Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place
by Louis Owens and Off the Reservation:
Reflections on
Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing, and Loose Canons by
Paula Gunn Allen
David Payne
............................................................................ 84

No story or song
will translate the full impact of falling or the inverse power of rising up.

Joy Harjo, "A Postcolonial Tale"

Karl Kroeber's
new book Artistry in Native American Myths reminds us that the study and
teaching of traditional
oral narratives represent what is possibly the most complex and yet the most promising aspect of
American Indian
Studies. The complexities derive from two primary issues. First, traditional status generally
implies performance
restrictions related to patterns of communal authority and these sometimes prohibit presentation
to a general audience.
Secondly, even for those texts deemed appropriate for audiences outside the community of
origin, we have so little
reliable interpretive material that discussion of a narrative's significance easily strays into
formalistic rigidities, bland
generalities or private appreciation, although books like Kroeber's have been of significant help
in countering these
tendencies. As we expand the body of commentary on oral literary texts, we inevitably question
the history of our
discipline and the history of the texts we study, with the latter being by far the more difficult to
address. Even some of
the simplest narratives show such intriguing traces of ancient sources that anyone sensitive to the
compulsions of the
past gets drawn into speculations about historical understandings of a text. Yet the move from
present observation of
a narrative's status to historical reconstruction of its past significance is one that the intellectually
cautious recognize
as a perilous exercise even though the exigencies of cur-{2}rent politics add their considerable weight to sheer
historical curiosity and imaginative delight as arguments for facing up to the task.
Educators at all levels seem to be in
agreement over the need for more consistently organized ongoing collective
efforts that would help us use the important specialized work of the last two decades, such as that
of Dell Hymes,
Dennis Tedlock, Karl Kroeber, Donald Bahr, Paul Zolbrod, Barre Toelken, William Bright,
Julian Rice and Julie
Cruikshank, most of whom quite sensibly base most of their analyses on texts that they
themselves have collected and
have seen performed. Christopher Vecsey in his book Imagining Ourselves Richly
competently surveys the many
academic approaches to the study of oral literatures and he illustrates the first stages of
comparative historical analysis
that ethnologists and linguists made possible earlier this century through their extensive
recording of texts from all
over the continent. If we engage in some sheer wishful thinking, freed just for the moment from
our usual concerns
about practical difficulties, we can take our cue from the title of Vecsey's book and imagine our
subdiscipline richly,
with different communities (academic or political) implementing the best that can be learned
from each of the
scholars mentioned above and also from the less well-known ones not listed in my abbreviated
disciplinary roster,
who have certainly done their own important ground-breaking work. As long as we are just
imagining, we can plan to
use all this impressive scholarly detail with the pedagogical awareness and immediacy that Greg
Sarris talks about in
his final chapters of Keeping Slug Woman Alive. And we should definitely
imagine tapping into the power that
characterizes the writings of poets and novelists so that critical discussions can become explicit
demonstrations of
attitudes toward language that we have learned from them. Finally, we need to link up with the
developing intellectual
debates led by people like Robert Warrior and Jace Weaver.
Such unbridled imagination in relation
to research and pedagogy has a definite, practical purpose because only
idealistically bold envisaging of what might be possible will keep alive our vision of collective
opportunities. But
sooner rather than later, we have to return to the practical matters we had briefly set aside in
favor of letting a vision
of possibilities emerge. What follows here is one kind of mapping within a general framework
that could allow us to
situate the more specialized endeavors in reference to each other and in relation to extra-literary
issues as part of an
effort to open the critical discussion to a broader range of voices and positions. I am also setting
up some tentative but
precisely informed moves into historical analysis in the second part of this article where I
illustrate how {3} elements
of one tale represent links in the associative networks of meaning, inferential presuppositions and
artistic strategies
that we still call "culture" even as we question virtually all the term has meant in the past.
Generalities are easy enough to come
by. It is more difficult to justify them within the cross-currents of debates
about the aims of cultural analysis and the appropriate authority of any given analyst. That is why
my initial general
proposals and the subsequent detailed illustration occur within my own adaptations of the
framework set forth by
Brian Stock in his l990 book Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the
Past.1 Stock's work is well-known in the field
of Medieval Studies. My reasons for bringing it into American Indian narrative studies are
primarily strategic. The last
fifty years have resulted in so much theorizing about textuality and culture in so many disciplines
that situating
oneself within the general field requires some careful mapping, hence my use of Stock's work as
a practical strategy
for keeping my own theoretical digressions to an absolute minimum while recognizing that
theoretically informed
alertness to abstract disciplinary formations is an indispensable back-drop to our work. Stock's
initial observations
sum up the current situation in American Indian Studies as effectively as they characterize other
contexts. "The
oralities and literacies of the past," he says, "are regularly made the subject of inquiries by
linguists, philosophers,
theologians, anthropologists and historians. But there is no common methodology, and the
methods developed in one
discipline are not always recognized in others" (l4l).
Stock may be underestimating the
cross-disciplinary utility of developments in discourse analysis which address
cognitive process in relation to narrative structure, but that does not take away from the value of
his strategies for
studying the historical development of textual communities.2 For all its apparent
simplicity, his approach to textual
communities involves a focus on the local community within a general perspective that
accommodates
well-articulated, slight shifts in the positions of several of the century's leading thinkers, while
remaining quickly
recognizable in terms of what we are already doing in relation to American Indian narratives. A
textual community is
"a group in which there is both a script and a spoken enactment and in which social cohesion and
meaning result from
the interaction of the two" (l00). The "script" is the problematic notion here, not because of the
oral/written dichotomy
but because of what it implies about a community's uses of texts to constitute communal identity
and because of the
difficulties in understanding the history of that usage. What I propose here is necessarily and
definitely a departure
from what medievalists do and from what most folklorists and anthropologists have {4}been
doing with archived
texts, although Dennis Tedlock pointed the way with his first published work on Zuni dynamics
of textual
interpretation.3 I propose an approach to cultural thinking that allows us to work
with a generically diverse body of
narratives in relation to other cultural artifacts from a definite historical period. Transcriptions of
texts will necessarily
have varying degrees of validity as a consequence of collection procedures. Nevertheless, we can
compensate to some
extent through the manner in which we use a range of different narratives and other cultural
artifacts so that they
become commentaries on each other and thereby reveal some verifiable elements of a historical
interpretive dynamic.
What makes this general approach so
useful is the explicit focus on social cohesion and meaning as deriving
from a continuing interactional dynamic. Therefore, our critical concern is with that dynamic.
Without getting too far
sidetracked by all that is implied by a philosophically overdetermined term like "meaning," I
want to quote Stock's
carefully reasoned position, one to which I will return when I begin to address the place of
custom in relation to our
commentary on definite texts and their history within communities. Stock addresses the
interpenetration of text and
behavior:

Meaning comes first. A text, proposed by one member of a group, is
understood by others in a similar way . . .
one text has given rise to another, the second being a combination of the original and an
interpretation. It is the
second that influences behavior . . . . We understand ourselves, Ricoeur correctly notes, "by the
long detour of
signs of humanity deposited in cultural works." Yet there are still longer detours: for example,
the manner in
which our preexisting values, sense of meaning, and education are shaped by experience, or the
manner in
which memory, reminiscence, and the unconscious play out roles in our everyday lives,
compelling us, as Freud
stresses, to enact dramas whose ultimate meaning may be hidden from us. (109)

The assumption
that narrative works to generate social cohesion by enacting the cognitive principles that grant
coherence to relations among changing variables is one of those givens of social theory that only
becomes useful
through tracing the concrete effects of its development. In an American Indian context, the
politics of dependent
sovereignty give a definite pragmatic edge to the need to develop methods of historically precise
documentation for a
process of maintaining distinctive textual communities.4 And, as we all know
only too well, precise documentation
{5} is considerably complicated by the nature of the
historical records. Therefore, we can start (have, in fact, already
started) by asking a series of elementary questions, documenting our answers and going from
there to other kinds of
studies. What kinds of texts currently function in this manner? How do different textual
communities achieve
overlapping boundaries so that individuals can claim membership in more than one? What kinds
of communal
agreements create the pragmatic conditions that enable a group to function as a narrating
community? That last
question points to the originary authority of local communities and the processes of
self-reflection that sustain
communities. We always have to go back to that local base. Stock himself notes:

A natural process of education takes place within the group, and, if the force
of the word is strong enough, it can
supersede the differing economic and social backgrounds of the participants, welding them, for a
time at least
into a unit . . . . The members may disperse, but they can also institutionalize their new relations .
. . . An aspect
of the social lives of the group's members will from that moment be determined by the rules of
membership in
the community. (150)

Legal questions of
sovereignty are all, to some degree, questions about the boundaries of communities that
maintain distinctive identities by way of reference to distinctive origins. Here I am not
necessarily referring only, or
even primarily, to historical or geographical origins. I am using the concept of origins in its
philosophical and in its
legal sense to refer to a specific symbolic economy with verifiable social consequences. Such
usage allows us to
connect many different kinds of analysis back to the political context of debates over sovereignty
and a community's
own means of determining the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. And I turn to a legal scholar
to make the
necessary connections between narrative analysis, communal boundaries and legal studies. His
observations are so
staggering in their implications that they more than make the case for any abstract claims that I,
using various
scholars, may be advancing about the utility of working with the idea of textual
communities.Milner S. Ball, a
professor of American constitutional law, has analyzed the American constitution, the origin
narrative for American civil rights, from the perspective of Indian land claims and his
astonishingly honest conclusion
is a call to interpretive legal action, a fact he clearly recognizes. "The American story of origins
fundamentally
excludes tribes and denies them voice . . . . I hope I am wrong" (2300).5 His
response is {6}radical indeed. He argues
for revisions of American constitutional law that would allow for inclusion of "multiple concepts
of origin in legal
paradigms." Undoubtedly, experts in constitutional law can and would find many ways to
challenge this idealistic
proposal. But whether or not any such fundamental change in constitutional interpretation ever
occurs, the fact that he
has articulated his arguments opens the way for lesser claims that can turn on a court's
understanding of what the term
"origins" signifies. Therefore, a constitutional lawyer's choice of how to demonstrate origins
turns out to have
considerable practical interest for all of us in American Indian Studies. Since Ball is using an
Iroquois example, we
might expect him to refer to an Iroquois creation story as evidence of origins. But that is not what
he does. Instead, he
chooses an example of material culture, an Iroquois wampum belt, and he analyzes it in a manner
that reveals it to be
a "record" of a symbolic economy. That economy is what serves as evidence of a coherent way of
life retaining
discernible cognitive features which determine elements of social life even as culture changes.
The cognitive economy
is read as strong evidence of a distinctive origin that determines social action and communal
identity. This point
cannot be overemphasized. Ball's analysis clearly makes an artifact "readable" in social scientific
terms. His argument
is that the terms of such readings should also have legal force because what he finds there sums
up the principles
which distinguish a community from others even as it describes terms of coexistence with those
others. He treats the
wampum belt as a text that does not refer to the particular details of origins, only to the principles
that derive
therefrom and that orchestrate the determined and determining historical significance of cultural
details.
If Ball's initial political observations
are bleak, his conclusions exhibit an extraordinary utopian optimism.
According to him such "texts" present "the point of departure for a fresh experiment in human
relationships, one in
the acceptance of which rests the only real hope of fulfilling the promise of secular life" (2318).
The implied
conjunction between legal analysis of narrative and ethnographic studies gives a definite,
pragmatic focus to studies
of textual communities, using the term "pragmatic" in its narrow linguistic as well as its broader
philosophical senses,
with the narrow linguistic focus referring to the verifiable features of meaning controlling a
context of interpretation.
Whether we start with an example of traditional art or a tale, we have to demonstrate how that
example reflects both
symbolic foundations and a history of changing interpretations. Whatever example of expressive
culture is designated
as "originary" in a legal sense must be one that also exists as evidence of a contemporary textual
commu-{7}nity.
Therefore, the authority of the local community is the deciding factor in making that selection
from among the
material or verbal artifacts of history. The selection process, itself, becomes an exercise in
sovereignty and it implies
an educational process whereby the local community achieves its own critical understanding of
what can be
accomplished through the self-reflexive activity that is the concomitant of critical thought.
With all these possibilities in mind,
we can return to Stock's characterizations of the dynamic involving texts and
the historical consequences of that process which distinguishes one community from another.
"The normal
hermeneutic activity is the experience of the text along with individual interpretations. In the
textual community . . .
there is a similar process at work, but here the interpretive variants are derived from thought and
life, the forms of life
having the same spontaneity as verbal glosses on a written text. Each community creates its
culture, subjectively
perceiving and objectively constructing new texts" (111-112).
Documenting various facets of this
process is a task for which we, as a subdiscipline, have already developed
rigorous and appropriate techniques. The task is well begun, but now we need to recruit more
members if we are to
study not just a text in context, but multiple texts interacting in the same context, all of them
adding a dimension of
significance to the others, each dimension attesting to the historical status of ideas at work in a
particular place. How
we might achieve an agreed-upon division of organized labors is a discussion that goes well
beyond my purposes in
this article, but my proposal here is that one currently neglected facet of the task involves the
study of archived texts,
most of them collected at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Flawed though these
texts may be, separated from most of the necessary contextual data, they nevertheless represent a
window to the past,
and in conjunction with currently vital texts that are their own kind of commentary on the older
versions, these
remnants are crucial elements of intellectual traditions.
With that observation I move from
general schemes to the concrete detailing of a process whereby texts and
"forms of life" comment on each other, generating new texts and keeping ancient texts in living
relation to historical
destinies. For illustrative purposes I am using a Lakota text, namely the Stone Boy story, which I
have studied,
translated, taught, and just plain puzzled over for more than thirty years now, and to which I keep
returning out of a
genuine sense of responsibility to the extraordinary range and evocative power of this
tale.6 But my reasons for
coming back to the tale go well beyond the subjective facts of long familiarity and {8}interest
in it. The most
convincing reason for using this particular text is that some of its episodes have an unbroken
history of performance
in Lakota communities.7 Therefore, we have transcriptions that allow us to
compare texts recorded in different Sioux
communities. Also, the plot type has wide intertribal distribution so we can also engage in more
broadly based
comparisons as we try to discern which elements indicate a specifically Lakota symbolic
economy.8 The way this tale
sums up features of belief proves it to be an origin tale in every sense of that term. It exhibits the
generative cognitive
principles that lie at the origins of the symbolic system and its event structure prefigures the
articulation of these same
principles in the social system and in ceremonial act, so we have a good body of concrete
evidence about the way
received narrative forms were used and adapted historically. When Lakota people claim this tale
as evidence of the
connection between their way of life and their landscape, they are making a claim that narrative
analysis supports as
historically legitimate. What I illustrate here is only one facet of the text's significance, only one
set of conjunctions
between narrative action and social understanding; therefore, a plot summary is enough to allow
me to make my
initial points even as I recognize how little such summary suggests about the nature of the text in
question.
Four brothers live together. One day a
woman comes to their tipi and just stands there. They discuss her
presence, decide that she will be their elder sister and invite her in. She brings with her a large
bag. They offer her
food but she refuses to eat. All but the youngest brother go out for the day's work. Then the
youngest turns into a bird
in order to observe the woman. She opens her bag and takes out what is needed for her gruesome
art of placing heads
on a shield. He overhears her talk about how the brothers' hair will find their place in the design
she is crafting, and he
warns his brothers that their new elder sister is up to no good. They try to escape and one by one
she kills all but the
youngest who follows the advice of a bird about how to kill her. Then he brings his brothers back
to life in a sweat
lodge. They return home. Soon, another woman arrives. In spite of their nervousness about
women who come from
outside to stand at their doorway, they proceed just as they had done the first time. This woman
eats when she is given
food; she opens her bag and starts making moccasins for the brothers. She is the perfect elder
sister. But she also adds
new elements to the household requirements, and when the brothers go off to bring her what she
needs, they do not
return. The sister fears that they have been killed. As she sings a mourning dirge, she looks for
something to suck on
and finds a shiny white pebble that she puts in her {9}
mouth and accidentally swallows. Stone Boy is born. When he
grows up, he asks why she grieves and when he learns of his absent uncles, he sets out on an
obstacle-ridden journey
to find them and gain their release from his father. Grandmother figures give him the necessary
powers. After
struggling for the lives of his uncles (in one extraordinary version this struggle is with his father),
he brings the
brothers back to their sister, his mother. Then occurs the episode in which Stone Boy rides a sled
downhill, placing
himself behind four white buffalo girls. On the way down the hill, he crushes the girls, provoking
their father the
Crazy Buffalo to attack him. To ward off the attacking buffalo, Stone Boy builds four concentric
palisades around the
tipi. The buffalo break all but the last before admitting that Stone Boy's is the greater power and
that the buffalo will
subject themselves to it.
Most versions of the story end at this
point, but one telling postscript given by Left Heron ends the episode with
a commentary that gives us a rare and extraordinary historical commentary on how people
understood the tale.

The woman who is not a wife, but is a mother, goes to the sky, not as a wife
but as a sister. Jack Rabbit and
Eagle came and said [to Stone Boy] "You are too powerful" and prayed for him to leave the
earth. [Stone Boy]
asked his relatives where they wanted to go. The six uncles became the seven sister star
constellation; three
were part of the head and one served as the tail. Then he asked his mother and she became the
North Star, but
[Stone Boy] decided to stay on earth to help. (McKeel)

As we work out connections
between this narrative and the history of the Sioux on the Great Plains, we find a
remarkable coincidence between narrative shifts and historical adaptation, a coincidence that I
propose is radical in
that it is bound to distinguishing historical features of Lakota life. And the episode that I want to
use to illustrate this
is, at first glance, the very one which would seem to negate all the claims that I have just made
because it is a highly
conventionalized episode that seems to refer only to the most ordinary and universal of human
relationships about
which one assumes little of interest can be said. I am referring to the opening motifs that precede
Stone Boy's heroic
action, the episode of the woman coming to that male household and her subsequent adoption as
a sister. As we
survey the available Sioux variations, we begin to see what features of the episode occurred with
highest frequency
among the west-{10}ern Sioux and that gives us the first
clues that get us beyond "seems" into what proves to be a
historical drama generating the social and narrative conventions, giving them a form that
repetition sculpted into an
elegant summation of a way of life.
For purposes of close analysis of this
introductory event, we need more than mere summary and I quote the first
few segments of my own translation of George Sword's version, noting that the presentational
units shown here were
determined by pause markers in the original text. Part of what strikes me about Sword's text is
the way his shortest
units seem to carry the most condensed social significance. Is this coincidence or is it evidence
that Sword's
performance style accommodated an audience's need for moments of reflection as convention
opened ever outward
toward expanding horizons of belief?

Four young men lived together,
One of them was called Hakela.
Suddenly, outside, they heard
someone who came and stood, so they told Hakela to look. He peeked out.

There was a
young woman, a most beautiful young woman. The front part of her hair was bound and she
had a great big bag. Like that she came and stood. Hakela saw her and he said, "Brothers, a
young woman is
there; she has arrived and she is standing; the front part of her hair is bound and she has a bag."
That's what he
said. And the oldest brother, that very one, said this, they say, "Invite her into the tipi. We have
no woman who
can be a sister, so she can be our elder sister," he said.
So Hakela peeked out and said,
"Sister, come in. Our oldest brother says we have no elder sister so you can
be our sister." So the woman said, "yes" and she settled down in their home.
They gave her food but she didn't eat.
She just sat there. So they tell. (Walker, Lakota Myth 89-90)

Whatever variations we may find
in the introductory motifs, all the rest of the action of the tale follows from the
brothers carrying out their newly acquired roles as men who could become brothers-in-law if
only they could survive
the dangers posed by relatives they don't even know, can't possibly know in a world still coming
into being. They get
the help they need from their nephew, once he comes from the sky by way of the second adopted
elder sister, the one
whose actions (and art) open the {11} social unit
outwards toward new possibilities, unlike the first one who turns it
inward, refuses the intermediacies represented by art, and decorates her shield with the heads of
the brothers. Without
question, though, this is an episode about the role of a sister, usually an elder sister, and
comparison of different
Lakota versions suggests that while the mode of the woman's arrival is variable (Bad Wound's
version has the
younger brother stubbing his toe and the sister coming forth from that brotherly gestation, but
this version, too,
elaborates the brothers' determination to keep her as a sister), the consistent emphasis on this
particular kinship role is
a western Sioux development.
The evidence becomes even more
compelling when the comparisons are extended to other tribes and we note
that the plot type is predictably introduced with an episode that shows how a woman becomes the
agent of
localization in a world without spatial or temporal orientation. The woman, who is the feminine
addition to the
elementary and exemplary household, always acquires a relational designation as a preliminary
condition of her
founding action and that relational role is the clue we need if we are to follow features of gender
categories through
their narrative orchestration in different tribes. If we turn to the most famous and theoretically
based comparatist of
them all, Claude Levi-Strauss, we find that he zeroes in on the episode, labeling the role of the
woman as "the
invariant feature of the group."9 From his structuralist point of view, the woman's
role is ambiguous and that
ambiguity is seen as the potential for transformations allowing different cultures to realize the
figure according to the
terms of their own system. The woman could be a potential wife, an old stranger who assumes or
otherwise acquires a
grandmother role, a young stranger who is designated as an older or a younger sister, a sister who
is a biological
sibling, even a sister-in-law. But if the role is ambiguous from a structuralist perspective that
seeks evidence of stable
elements within a hemispheric system, it is anything but so from the perspective of the local
community. The way a
specific social group develops this variable element appears to be just the kind of strong evidence
we look for as we
try to understand how definite communities shaped a story's received or borrowed elements,
giving them the fit
required by the local belief system. Whatever role this woman plays in a community's narrative
heritage, she
prefigures the woman's place. Her work bag is one every woman will open.
Certainly in a Lakota context the fact
that the woman is consistently an adopted sister, usually an elder sister,
turns out to be the realization that says it all, that makes this relational term into the means
whereby all {12}the basic
principles of the symbolic order are given dynamic realization in different domains of expressive
culture. If such
commentary seems like typically overstated academic rage for order, we find it to be mere sober
summary when we
validate it with George Sword's statements of late nineteenth- century beliefs. In a text
specifically intended to teach
the fundamentals of Lakota belief, Sword clearly refers to the four brothers as the Four Winds,
their tipi as the world,
and the good elder sister as Wohpe, the woman from the sky whom Finger, another of Sword's
contemporaries,
identifies as the bringer of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe. (See Walker, Belief
103-104, 109-112 and Myth 58-89.) Once
these connections are in place, anyone who has even the slightest familiarity with Lakota thought
can recognize that
the conventional nineteenth-century introduction to the Stone Boy story really does evoke the
foundations of the
entire belief system. And that gives considerable weight to the question about the woman's status
as adopted elder
sister rather than as wife. Calculating the social logic from the position of the elder sister shifts
many received
anthropological notions about Lakota social organization and gender roles, but it is a direction
that promises a way out
of the rigidity of previous impositions of external models of social structure on internal
dynamics.10
Before going beyond the generic
requirements of the narrative world, we do well to survey the western Sioux
narrative tradition for more pervasive evidence of how the elder sister role operates within the
narrative system.
Survey proves the pivotal role of the adopted sister within the discursive world of the old
ohunkakan, the Lakota
category for ancient tales from an era before the current historical world. In those tales, the
adopted sister, generally
the elder sister, presents the brothers with a series of options about how to negotiate with the
world outside the
microcosm of their own social unit. These negotiations are the action that brings society into
being. Lakota ohunkakan
develop the consequences deriving from four of these options: l) the sister is stolen and the sister
as captive requires
that the brothers negotiate relationships with the captors; 2) the brothers are captured in their
quest to find what the
sister needs, and the captive brothers establish sister's son and brother's captors in a relationship
requiring negotiation
(the Stone Boy plot option); 3) the sister's husband is captured and the captive brother-in-law
establishes the brothers
in opposition to sister's husband's captors; 4) an adopted brother tries to become a husband and
the sister as captive
within the family unit establishes brothers as enemies to each other. This last option is the Sioux
mythic explanation
for inclement weather. The North {13} Wind wants to
rape the adopted sister; she hides under her robe to escape and
has to remain there; her robe covers the earth and from beneath she sends up vegetation when the
sun shines. The
sister's progeny are plants. (See Dakota Texts and Lakota
Myth.)
In all these narratives we see that the
consequences of brother/sister relationships develop mythic categories,
lining up the possibilities, not in terms of male and female oppositions but in terms of
oppositions between categories
represented by differently classified male figures who achieve their social position through their
relationship with the
sister, who consistently acts as a mediating agent. While the general pattern undoubtedly has
validity for many Native
American groups, the particularities point toward details of historical development.
How can we set up the move from
narrative pattern to the actuality of social life, a move that allows for the
possibility of using narrative evidence for historical purposes?11 We should
quickly note, as ethnographers
consistently have, that even outside the symbolic constructs of the old ohunkakan, the Sioux gave
primacy to
brother/sister relationships. We also need to note that within the ceremonial system, two
ceremonies are said to be the
direct requirements of the White Buffalo Cow Woman; the first is the Hunka ceremony, normally
performed for
young girls, which altered the kinship system for one generation. Therefore, any woman, no
matter the order of her
birth, could be someone's elder sister. The second was the puberty ceremony for women, which
enacted the fact that
all women were younger sisters of White Buffalo Cow Woman. Simple acknowledgment,
though, is just the first step
in a process that expands into a social logic linking the symbolic realm with social organization
to create an
associational matrix that gives definite reference to abstractions like "symbolic economy." And if
we are to get closer
to historical detail, we need to turn to the ceremonial action that made young Lakota women into
younger sisters of
the White Buffalo Cow Woman.
Here again, for purposes of historical
scholarship, I insist on a distinction between the ceremony itself and the
texts that are evidence of how Lakotas chose to explain ceremonies at a particular historical
moment. Texts that
represent a tradition of commentary on ceremonial action are indispensable sources for evidence
of cognitive features
indicating a tradition of interpretation, or we might say, a tradition of internal criticism and
philosophical reflection
with its own local structure and rules. Thus, we are looking at a local educational system. We are
looking at how a
community created its texts about its own ceremonial identity. If we turn to the women's puberty
ceremony, we find
texts and some crucial cogni-{14}tive clues that give
defining detail to the emerging picture of the adopted elder sister
as figuring all that constituted Lakota gender categories. Turn-of- the-century texts reveal the
detail and the dynamic
by which all women become younger sisters of the White Buffalo Cow Woman, who aligns and
assigns all
relationships in Lakota culture. The Sioux taught that kinship itself was her gift to the
people.12 In other words,
without the possibility of ceremonial recognition and reorganization, biological consanguinity is
meaningless. We
find all this ringingly endorsed when, at the end of the ceremony, the leader said to the young
girl, "You are now a
woman. The buffalo woman is your oldest sister. Go out of this lodge" (DeMallie 252).
The theme of newness in conjunction
with that command to action "go out of this lodge," is one that can be
brought back to the underlying structure of interpretation that links ceremonial and narrative
understanding. The
ceremony requires a new tipi, a new dress, a new breechclout, even a new ceremonial order since
individual holy men
presiding over it sought a vision to learn the exact order for each ceremony. The young woman
was literally taken out
of her tipi, her old dress, her former relationships. She was brought ceremonial step by
ceremonial step to the center
of a new tipi, where she was given a new dress, a new role, a new point of interiority from which
to act. Then, she
was taken outside again at the end of the ceremony after her father had thrown the new
breechclout outside the
ceremonial space. And that gesture announces the next stage of externalisation/internalisation for
which she is now
ready--namely marriage and motherhood (Lakota Belief and Ritual 251). Her
relationship to her elder sister
inaugurates a spiraling series of stepping across thresholds that choreograph woman's gender
roles according to an
underlying theme of location, transformation and translocation, a point to which I will
return.
Once we recognize how the elder
sister role operates as the pivotal point of contact between belief, ceremonial
organization and social organization, we are in position to appreciate the fact that for the Lakotas
the coming of the
White Buffalo Cow Woman with the Sacred Pipe is a historical event. Lakota belief is definite
on this point, just as
the tradition is definite in its distinctions between a mythic temporality about which little is
known and a historical
one for which each group must account in terms that prove the group's continuing identity in
relation to the facts of
individual agency. The basic premise of Lakota identity is the historical fact of a way of life that
began a specified
number of generations ago with the gift of the Sacred Pipe that makes them who they are. The
presence of the Pipe
{15} is the fact that channels older mythic significance,
like that found in the Stone Boy story, into the ordinary forms
of life and historical action. The difference in discursive modality marks a crucial cognitive
intentionality. One might
argue that we are still within the realm of belief, not empirical historical fact, but there is
absolutely no doubt that
with this belief we have the cognitive basis for historical action on the part of Lakota people who
perceive themselves
as Lakotas because ceremonial action marks them as younger sisters and brothers of White
Buffalo Cow Woman.
In switching from the content of a
single event to local elaboration on the significance of the elder sister role, I
may seem to have abandoned the artistry of the tale, indeed the very idea of a narrative construct,
in order to insist on
the condensed social significance of a few opening moves. And, to some extent, that effect may
be an inevitable
consequence of the argument on behalf of history which requires some straightforward
justification. Nevertheless, I
want to insist yet again on the important distinction between historical and/or sociological fact
and the narratives that
arise from the collective process of making the experience of that facticity operative and
memorable, and I want to
repeat that what I seek to illustrate is the range of texts that are indirect commentaries on each
other because they arise
from similar collective strategies for memorializing meaning. I can illustrate this interplay of
texts and advance my
commentary on the plot of my reference tale by picking up on the name of the hero with its many
resonances in
Lakota belief.
In keeping with my emphasis on
textual dynamics, I want to address beliefs about stone by looking at the
presentational structure as well as the content of a nineteenth-century Lakota text written by
Thomas Tyon who was
explaining why stone is perceived as sacred. He does not start, as he could have, with reference
to beliefs or narratives
about stone. Instead, he launches the presentation with an actual experience. Something
happens--a man dreams of
stone. We should not go too quickly past Tyon's concrete opening move. His structural point of
departure is that event
whereby belief enters history when it becomes a definite motive in the life of a known individual.
Tyon then talks
about the customary action that follows from the dream experience and he establishes the link
between these dreams
and the Yuwipi Society that brought together men with similar spiritual experiences. Concrete
social organization
follows from dream experience. Men act and their actions are the collective interpretation of the
meaning of stone's
sacredness within history.
Human action is, of course, the stuff
of continuing narrative, and the fact that a man's narrative of his own deeds
was an indispensable part of {16}his cultural authority is further evidence of continuing
narrative genesis, with each
new autobiographical tale serving as a commentary on every other tale about the same powers.
After describing how
dreams about stone lead to the formation of a society, Tyon proceeds to another ordinary event
that would account for
that society's performing its social role. At this stage, Tyon gets remarkably specific. "So it is that
if someone loses a
horse, he might make a feast for the Rock dreamer." The ensuing ceremony is performed for the
purpose of finding
what is lost and the detail of Tyon's text makes ordinary curiosity into commentary on the
continuing action of an
ancient text. "So the rocks tell about whoever stole the horse, even the name and the place. They
come to report
everything, they say" (Walter, Lakota Belief and Ritual 154). We can here recall
that Left Heron's gloss on the ending
of the Stone Boy tale identifies the power of Stone Boy with that of the stone in the Yuwipi
Ceremony. Stone locates
what is lost. The elder sister locates stone within Lakota ceremonial life. Textual realizations of
the process locate
individual experience within the discursive space of a textual community. Or, to put it in more
simple and direct
terms, telling about Stone Boy keeps everything in place. And, as the tale tells us, his mother is
the means by which it
was possible to think about things having a place, and we come back to thinking about how
gender works in the
context we are explicating.
With this brief allusion to Stone Boy
himself, the hero of our tale, I have also switched to a more direct emphasis
on what is made and what is done as a consequence of the continuing action implied by the text.
(It is not properly
action of the text so much as it is action that arises out of the same structure of intentionality as
the text.)13 If we
return to those few opening motifs that have been the basis for the interplay of texts that I have
been setting up, we
have to note that most versions refer to the sisters as artists. As soon as they find their place
within the brothers'
household, each one sets to work on her characteristic designs. Once again we can turn to
comparative analysis for
some guidance on how far to go with this observation, and once again comparison suggests that
we should recognize
these motifs as bearing the signifying features of a pervasive cultural dynamic. Comparison
shows that a tribe's
understanding of the origins and purposes of women's art is regularly bound up with the way
these opening motifs
develop.14 As we set certain of these texts in interpretive relation to each other,
we find that the juxtaposition lets us
see how the vivid detail of ordinary life affirms the cognitive continuum between daily custom
and artistically
elaborated narrative.
Choosing one out of many possible
examples, I pick a straightforward {17} descriptive late
nineteenth-century
text by No Ears. He starts his narrative by evoking the scene when men return to camp after the
buffalo hunt, singing
the buffalo song. Men have killed the buffalo. That act occasions a transfer of responsibility
which is also a transfer
from masculine to feminine cultural prerogatives, from direct action to artistic transformation.
Custom dramatizes the
transfer. The women went outside the boundaries of the camp and picked up the men's song as
they began the process
of dividing the body of the buffalo, transforming it so that each part conformed to cultural need.
Each separation was
prelude to others, so that as the buffalo was divided and subdivided according to social rules, the
women mimed their
own roles of reproducing cultural forms. As No Ears is careful to point out, the women "own" the
forms that are their
continuing transformations of what the buffalo has given with the notion of continuity being
demonstrated as
individual elements take on more and more "abstract" cultural form, with the most abstract being
also the
ceremonially designated sign of totality, namely the decorated white buffalo robe. The younger
sisters of the buffalo
woman work the border between outside and inside through their transformations and these
transformations pattern
the form of cultural life. All this is quite literal. The detail of the No Ears text deserves some
direct quotation to show
how the significance of one event transfers to others.

Then the women sang the song and hurried to the carcasses and skinned
them. They skinned one half and cut
the skin in two along the back. Then they turned the carcass over and skinned the other half. All
the women
went out to skin and cut up the carcasses, but the skin of the carcass belonged to the woman of
the man who
killed it. This could be known by the arrow. The meat was divided among all in the camp. . . .
The women dried
and tanned the skins and they belonged to them. They made tipis and robes of the skins and they
made dresses
and leggings and moccasins of the skins of the young animals. The women owned the tipis. They
cut the poles
and trimmed them. They put up and took down the tipis. (Walker, Society 40)

This ordinary drama of Great Plains life is an act of localization.15 Woman
transforms and places, or it may be more
accurate to say that she transforms and replaces. What comes from elsewhere is brought into her
space and given
agency therein. Stone Boy comes from the sky; the buffalo comes from afar; men arrive from
another unrelated
household. The man standing outside the woman's tipi (as occurred in courting prac-{18}tice) seems like the reversal
of the initial situation found in our tale where the women arrive at the tipi of the four brothers.
But that seeming takes
no account of the way arrivals are the occasion of crossings and translocations, movement in and
out of demarcated
space, which transforms the significance of that space as women "turn" the forms they make.
With this observation
we can note again that the mythic women who arrive at the brothers' tipi have their work bags
with them. They arrive
ready and willing to do their particular art and once they are inside the tipi, it is theirs. The life of
the social unit flows
from their achieving their art and that always involves a process of bringing inside what has been
outside the social
unit, the tiyospaye. The first sister, of course, reverses that process. She takes what is inside and
places it on the other
side of life; she stops action, immobilizes the brothers. The second one shows that woman's
transformative action, her
art, localizes by centralizing. She knows that mediation is transformation that shifts life forms
from sphere to sphere.
Lakota life advances by a continuing process of interiorisation and exteriorisation in which men
and women change
their respective positions so that each turning makes or unmakes life. Detailing this summation
would continue to
expand the importance of that mythic sister who swallows a clear white stone as she mourns the
adopted brothers who
have gone off to get her what she needs. The stone comes from the sky to the human community
and brings the
brothers back home before he sends them, the buffalo daughters, and his mother back to the
sky.
In the interests of an economy that is
certainly not symbolic, namely the economy of a single article, we need to
side-step commentary on other features of the tale and cut to the ending and the final role of the
mythic elder sister.
Left Heron's coda to the story, quoted above, tells us that Stone Boy sends his mother to the sky
where she is the
North Star, the pivot around which all else is measured, just as the elder sister role is the pivotal
one in the kinship
structure. The North Star enables people to make those calculations that let them find their way
in the geographical
landscape, and the elder sister lets them find their way in the spiritual and relational landscape.
At this point, I can end
what is designed to suggest possibilities for using archived texts in relation to historical and
cultural analysis by
emphasizing again how a textual dynamic achieves consonance with a social one, not, I believe,
because one is
abstracted from the other but because each creates the other within that other dynamic which is
history and which
inevitably requires new referents, new agents by which to maintain meaning.
At various stages of this
demonstration, I have clearly been in critical {19}
territory previously explored by
others in the field of American Indian narrative study. Just as I have been concerned to show an
interplay of texts that
sets up the terms of interpretation, each for the other, I am concerned to show how different
critical projects open out,
each upon the other. Dennis Tedlock was the first among us to draw attention to the hermeneutic
process occurring
through oral performance. His article "The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in
American Indian
Religion" is certainly one of the essential articles for the field. In the preceding illustration, I have
been demonstrating
that we can expand the range of texts that we use to show how any community maintains its own
tradition of
interpretation. This argument for expansion of textual analysis in a given specific locale is one of
the practical
consequences of the emphasis on textual communities. The textual commentaries I use all come
from responsible
Lakota leaders at the same period of history; the historical mapping of authoritative transmission
represents another
neglected task. Transmission reveals the genealogy of authority. The historical reality of that
transmission is every bit
as essential to understanding a group as the propositional content of any narrative, historical or
otherwise. The period
of history on which this article concentrates is one of upheavals in this genealogy. The
individuals quoted in this brief
article--people like Sword, Left Heron, Tyon, Bad Wound and Finger--engaged in soul-searching
about how
knowledge should be preserved and transmitted, and that experience is now part of any
interpretation of material they
left us.16
At several points in the preceding
analysis, but most especially in relation to translation methods, I am clearly
indebted to Dell Hymes' many-faceted contributions which call for attention to event structure
and presentational form
as these can be inferred from precisely informed translation. While the linguistic analysis in this
article is relegated to
one footnote, I have done far more extensive and detailed studies of the relevant semantic fields.
These, in turn, allow
me to postulate how underlying cognitive themes shape event structure. This work links the
ethnolinguistic theory of
Madeline Mathiot with that of developments in discourse theory only to come back to some of
Hymes' ideas about
presentational units.17 These steps in place, I believe that we can assert
sociological and historical significance for
presentational units but that precise demonstration goes beyond the bounds of this article.
Motives for historical study are many,
but political necessity certainly has priority. The body of critical analysis
linking literature to law is, happily, growing. Julie Cruikshank's article "Negotiating with
Narrative" {20}is another
of those basic works that are creating the boundaries of a field of study that emphasizes the role
of audience. She
notes that the practice of allowing members of communities to introduce their own terms into
land claims
negotiations is definitely an advance. Yet, she says, "there are risks . . . even when they share
terminology, indigenous
people may understand these terms to have meanings very different from those attributed by
government negotiators
for whom such language has become routine." She goes on to ask "And what messages does the
language of
indigenous narrative carry to multicultural audiences?" (57-58). Her questions justify this entire
exercise.18
I could go on with a process of
demonstrating how people in our field are already doing the work that lets us map
textual communities that have definite geographical locations. Beyond that place in space, they
have definite
epistemological boundaries that are rarely exclusive. Obviously, people normally belong to
multiple textual
communities, but some historical process, affecting several domains of expressive culture, has to
be the generative
source of performed enactments of belonging to these communities. My purpose, as stated at the
beginning of this
exercise, is to build more bridges between existing bodies of scholarship, so that our scholarship
related to texts
within communities can acquire some of the pragmatic edge that communities need to assure the
future identities they
choose, with the emphasis once again firmly on the choices of the communities. People in
academic positions could
work with definite communities to designate the body of texts that the community views as
public evidence of
communal identity. The process of developing an interpretation of that body of texts will involve
scholars from
various disciplines because interpretation is simply one more phase in adjusting meaning to
different audiences and
some audiences are defined by institutions with particular rhetorical requirements. Academic
interpretations have no
more or less authority than those occurring outside the academy. Their authority is simply
different, adapted to
particular strategic purposes.
My own work in cognitive style was
originally motivated by an apparent gap between historical archived
materials and contemporary performance. I believed that the right kind of look at what was
happening with
contemporary narrative would reveal a cognitive continuity that might not be immediately
evident at the propositional
level but which nevertheless represented a traditional communal process. The hypothesis
certainly allowed me to find
more artistry in the contemporary materials than would otherwise have been possible. Whether or
not such work
could reveal the operation of tradition at the level of style remains, in my opin-{21}ion, an idea worth pursuing. The
indispensable first stage of such a demonstration requires historical analysis of the sort I begin
here but have pursued
in detail well beyond what is indicated here. The next stages would involve juxtaposing the
patterns revealed by all
that detail to what is found in contemporary materials. Clearly such tasks require considerable
time and effort, and
that is another argument for collaborative efforts. As a subdiscipline, we have made impressive
advances in the last
twenty-five years. The questions now are, "where can we go from here?" and "what kind of
plurality is signified by
'we'?"

NOTES

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990.

The many works of Teun van Dijk and his associates have been developing models for
scientific study of narrative
pragmatics in relation to propositional structures. The models strategize notions of narrative
competence in relation
to performance. The research that is generally categorized as ethnography or sociology of
communication has
applied many theoretical principles of discourse analysis to American contexts, with Dell Hymes'
ground-breaking
work making the connection with Native American narratives. See in particular "The
Ethnography of Speaking" in
T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, eds., Anthropolgy and Human Behavior, p 13-53. Washington
DC:
Anthropological Society of Washington. An excellent introductory text in the field is Alexandra
Georgakopoulou
and Dionysis Goutsos' Discourse Analysis. Their sketch of future agendas for the
field includes the observation
that each analytic method is but prelude to "a broad-based approach that applies to language any
and all roads to
understanding, including introspection, experimentation, theorizing, and above all careful
observation of the
myriad discourse practices within social and cultural practices (Chafe, l990: 21). Discourse
analysis needs to be
able to combine the rigorous, disciplined and systematic investigation with the attention and
sensitivity to the
personal and the particular" (184).

"The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation" in Kroeber, TraditionalLiteratures of the American Indian:
Texts and Interpretations. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981.

The connection between narrative analysis and claims of sovereign {22}status
is recognized by a number of
scholars in the field of international law. An especially helpful analysis is that given by Andrew
Carty in Was
Ireland Conquered? International Law and the IrishQuestion. "By way of
introduction to the liberal critique, it is
necessary to repeat the basic assumption of legal method in this study which rests not on the state
as such but on a
form of collective identity of peoples. It is only appropriate that a material rather than a formal
definition of
international personality should look to a hermeneutic and, where necessary, a deconstruction of
the ideological
structures which represent the typical modes of experience and practice of collective groups as
such. These
structures form an interrelated network, simply because they have a common historical root. It is
vital to stress that
the unspoken cultural assumptions and beliefs are not necessarily or simply reproduced by state
action or even by
elite manipulation. It is not even a matter of analysis at the level of observable political behavior
and explicit
political preference. Indeed individual and even party political beliefs may appear logically
incoherent. Yet it is a
matter of attempting to identify the sense of community of a group in terms which it can itself
recognize. Such a
perspective is an inevitable consequence of the assumption that the people are prior to the state
and that the latter
is, indeed, no more than a contingent administrative and institutional framework which the
people give
themselves" (123).

Karl Kroeber also discusses this text in Artistry in Native AmericanMyths. He, too, sees the myth as important to
understanding historical process. His discussion covers far more features of the tale than I do in
this article.

The question of what constitutes a legitimate basis for comparison runs like a fault line
through all my references
to comparative research. In the interests of critical economy, I believe that we can start with the
notions of tale type
and motifs that allow us access to the bibliographical work of historic-geographic tradition. That
basis for {23}
comparison will not get us very far, though, in considering the cognitive themes that bind
different genres. Claude
Levi-Strauss, of course, recognized that inadequacy and aimed for a more abstract basis in
systematic
transformations. But his approach moves so quickly to high level abstractions that it bypasses the
intermediate
stages by which individuals and communities adjust received forms to their own uses, the very
stages that interest
me here. Still, all of these early efforts to find a basis for comparison provide indispensable tools
for first-stage
scanning. My own work with texts in the region convinces me that the Stone Boy tale is related
to two normally
separated groups of texts. First, the group of texts famously classified as the Star Husband
complex. Among the
Ojibwa this complex includes episodes of the Double Woman complex. Among the Sioux the
Double Women
acquire a younger, less dangerous sister whose form seems to coalesce into that of the younger
sister of the Stone
Boy story thereby linking the Star Husband complex to a body of hero tales which may or may
not present the hero
as the son of a celestial being. The incident of the two sisters seems to link these vast branches of
North American
mythology. The basis and importance of such speculation derives from the link between these
two bodies of
narrative and gender roles in conjunction with the origins of women's art which in turn sum up a
basic series of
localizing operations. I propose that cognitive complexes I would sum up under a rubric like
"localizing
operations" make a more telling basis for comparison than the old distinctions between plot
types.

The entire chapter entitled "Three Adornments" in The Origin ofTable
Manners is devoted to this narrative
complex. Levi-Strauss touches on Arapahoe, Crow, Gros Ventre and Omaha versions. He used
Bad Wound's
Sioux version which, according to Sioux terms, is exceptional. The woman is a sister but not
necessarily an elder
sister and she does not arrive at the tipi from the world beyond. Nevertheless, Levi-Strauss does
pick up on the
connections between the type and the significance of women's quill work, just as he perceives
that issues of
location and translocation are somehow involved. The details of these broad-based intercultural
themes can only be
worked out through close analysis of a single culture's expressive forms. Using the structuralist
comparative data,
though, supports my contention that the presentational units in Sword's version of the story
represent highly
compressed significance.

What I propose regarding kinship studies is radical but not entirely {24}without precedent. Differentiating
between a social structural approach to kinship (genealogical, precisely integrated) and a cultural
approach
(broadly defined to include symbolic interpretations) Raymond DeMallie argues that each
provides "entirely
different kinds of understandings of kinship systems" (143) with the latter being more
particularistic because it
does not begin with the imposition of an outside framework. He notes that "for the Sioux, kinship
is an active
force, the act of relating. They understand their own kinship system to be in striking contrast to
the static nature of
American kinship . . . " (132). Establishing a way to begin thinking about a Lakota cultural
approach, he observes
"By restricting kinship to genealogy, the social-structural approach fails to note that the Sioux
define relationship
in terms of a set of conceptual categories and the logical relationships among them based on
proper 'feeling' and
behavior, rather than on concrete links of marriage and birth. Although those biological factors
are at the basis of
Sioux kinship, they are in fact deemphasized by the system, both in terms of classification and
behavior" that "like
all other fundamentals of Sioux culture, kinship was the gift of wak'an tanka, the 'great spirits'
brought by the
White Buffalo Cow Woman, their messenger . . . . When the sacred woman arrived in the Sioux
camp, she gave
the people the sacred pipe and tobacco, with the instructions that they be used for prayer. In a
linguistic sense,
prayer invokes kinship. To pray and to address someone by a kin term are the same action
(wacekiya)" (142).

The historiographer Hans Kellner has summarized some of the questions that historians
now share with
narratologists, questions which reveal some of the issues for which narrative analysis can yield
information to the
advantage of both historical and literary understanding. "If the processes of the historical
imagination are
specifically literary only in the final stages of creation, however, I have argued in this book that
they are
everywhere linguistic, shaped and constrained from the start by rhetorical considerations that are
the 'other' sources
of history. The immortality of facts is dependent upon the conventions of discourse governing the
culture that
accepts their authority, which is to say, the authority of the process by which they are constituted.
This authority is
an important form of the cultural power to be sure, and the basis of the human sciences, but it is a
tenuous sort of
immortality indeed. In the first place, facts themselves are invariably constituted by communities
through defining,
naming parts, sorting these designated objects, devising conceptions of the relations be-{25}tween them,
distinguishing oppositions and contraries, selecting beginnings and endings, eliding gaps,
evaluating relative
importance among objects that will differ from existing objects in detail while resembling them
in kind" (325-326).

See DeMallie, "Kinship and Biology in Sioux Culture," in North AmericanIndian Anthropology. Norman: U of
Oklahoma P, 1997.

Establishing terminology for looking at the relationships between event structure and
intentionality is one of the
great merits of Stock's approach. He sees any text as an event. I would qualify his notion of
complexity in relation
to the text in order to draw attention to text as a macro-event organizing micro-events. That
being
said, I find his
ideas of intentionality in relation to event of enormous practical significance for those of us
interested in the
historical study of American Indian texts. "To rephrase the two positions of which I speak above,
an event can be
understood as the product of something, or as the intention to be something. As a product it is the
consequence of
earlier, but not necessarily related events--such as, for example, the consuetudo that appears as
'law' in the
medieval manor after emerging from a welter of customary practices. As intention it is related to
thoughts and
actions that will take place but have not yet done so, and it derives its meaning from someone's
looking back from
the vantage point of a later time--as, for example, when the same feudal consuetudo is considered
a 'law' by
medieval commentators or modern historians" (81).

For example, Clark Wissler's Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians includes a
text elaborating on events involving
the two sisters, brothers, and the formation of Ursa Major. The older and dangerous sister is
noted as "a powerful
medicine-woman. She could tan hides in a new way" (69). Definite references like this point us
toward less
obvious but finally more important comparisons that let us set up a semantic field of relations
between bear, stone,
origins of women's art and constellations in the sky. These relations will vary from tribe to tribe,
of course, but
they always point toward features of gender categories as these features establish categories of
time and space. An
especially important text within this complex is "The Deserted Children" in Robert Lowie's "The
Assiniboine."
The brother/sister pair are deserted because young girls have angered bead (or shell) maker. To
provide his sister
with a proper lodge, the brother goes in search of "something half-stone, half-bear." The entire
complex narrates
how a group calibrates distances between a woman and the {26}sources of materials for her art. The distance itself
sets up points that allow for the calculation of time. A woman's art includes the human form
itself and
reproduction, culturally understood, is, of course the basis for relational categories. The belief
that the designs
appropriate to women's art come from supernatural beings through dream experiences is a
general belief that gives
this important complex its particular force.

Some detailing of semantic fields emphasizes the significance of this comment. The term
tan is a contraction of
tancan or body. It is also a reference to the severed half of the buffalo hide. There is
a metonymic transfer at work
whereby a body exists as half of something. (Themes of twins take on particular significance in
this context.) The
potential for confusion between phonemics and morphemics is real. Nevertheless, at the risk of
such confusion, I
point out that the term for sister's husband is tanhan and the temptation to
transliterate that as the body standing up
continuously in a definite place is evident from the arguments of this paper. Marriage localizes
the other half.
People inclined to think in terms of dualisms are bound to appreciate this evidence of a body
divided in half but
brought together again in the individual household (itself literally half of the buffalo) by way of
marriage. This is
especially intriguing since there is so little evidence of dualism in Lakota sociology.

Some information about each of these leaders is included in LakotaMyth in relation to the presentation of their
tales, including George Sword's life and texts.

Madeline Mathiot's theoretical assumptions also guide our first-stage textual analysis. "The
hypothesis underlying
the present approach is that the theme structure of a language is related to the theme structure of
a
culture. The
degree to which the two structures are related constitutes the degree of integratedness of the
language in the total
culture . . . . The assumption implicit in the usual interpretation of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is
that the cognitive
domain of language is directly related to culture, thus influencing cultural behavior." In the
present approach, this
assumption is replaced by the postulation of two separate theme structures related to each other
in varying degrees.
Thus instead of direct correlations, an intermediate level is proposed. This means that language
and culture
relations are expected to emerge on a higher level of abstraction. This also means that no
necessary determinism is
postulated in the relation of language to culture.{27}

See "Negotiating with Narrative: Establishing Cultural Identity at the Yukon International
Storytelling Festival" in
American Anthropology 99.1 1997.

This is
not about race; this is about vision. The people who live on this continent are Indians, that is to
say, they
live on the Indian continent, and what we must do is teach them how to live here. We tried and
they kept killing
us. That was then; but now maybe there are people here, lots of them, who are ready. . . .

Paula Gunn
Allen1

In her 1992 preface to The
Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine inAmerican Indian Traditions
(1986), Allen
remarks that "something sacred indeed is going on," because she recognizes a "truly Native
American Renaissance"
due to interest generated by recent movies such as DancesWith Wolves
and the emergence of successful Indian
writers (xiv).2 Allen explains that "worldwide interest in and attention to the
wisdom of the 'First Peoples'" continues
to grow, and this wisdom arises from predominantly "woman-centered or gynocratic tribal
societies" (264), with
female traditions informing the work of many contemporary Native American writers.
Additionally, a recurring theme
in much American Indian literature is survival: not simply existence but the preservation of a
collective heritage, an
unwavering sense of spirituality and connectedness, and a capacity for hope. Allen writes that the
"endurance of tribal
beauty is our reason to sing, to greet the coming day and the restored life and hope it brings" (xi).
Composed from an
American Indian woman-centered perspective, Allen's "songs" (poetry and prose) reflect a spirit
of survival and hope.{30}
A self-described "breed," Paula Gunn
Allen's father is Lebanese-American and her mother, who was born on the
Laguna Pueblo reservation, is Scotch-Laguna. Allen was raised in New Mexico in the Spanish
land grant town of
Cubero, about fifty miles west of Albuquerque. Sent to a Catholic boarding school at age six,
Allen's Christian
upbringing influences her writing, especially in the semi-autobiographical novel The
WomanWho Owned the
Shadows. Allen's perspective as a "mixed-blood" or "half-breed" dramatically informs her
work, which is sometimes
compared to Gloria Anzaldúa's, with a common focus on writing from the margins or
"borders."
Allen is related to Laguna writers
Leslie Marmon Silko (cousin) and Carol Lee Sanchez (sister). Native
American author N. Scott Momaday and writers Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley have been
important influences
for her. Feeling confined by conventional Western literary standards, Allen developed a writing
style grounded in a
Native American and woman-centered perspective. Like Anzaldúa, Allen is associated
with many separate identities
but is never wholly incorporated into any particular group. While she describes her main
affiliations as Native
American, lesbian, and feminist, Allen remains an outsider straddling the various margins.
Writing from multiple
perspectives, she claims "literature that rides the borders of a variety of literary, cultural, and
ideological realms, has
not been adequately addressed by either mainstream feminist scholarship or the preponderance of
'ethnic' or 'minority'
scholarship" ("Border" 305). In Allen's view, literature must be placed in its proper context in
order to be understood.
Consequently, she believes it is imperative that readers familiarize themselves with Native
American cultures to
appreciate the significance of her writing, and she developed an excellent guidebook,
Studies in AmericanIndian
Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, to facilitate the project of learning about
American Indian traditions.
Constantly aware of her position as
liaison between Native and white cultures, Allen "always shapes her
aesthetic and critical work to mediate between Native American and white experience," explains
Elizabeth Hanson
(40). Allen emphasizes the need to read literature in its proper context because she possesses an
intense desire to
convey realistic, thoughtful depictions of Native Americans through the various genres of essay,
poetry, and novel.
However, her work is occasionally criticized as having an uneven quality, and critics tend to
examine Allen's fiction
and nonfiction simultaneously, often referring to statements in The Sacred Hoop
while explicating her poetry or
novel. Yet Allen has played an extremely {31}important role in the Native American "renaissance," and
American
literatures in general, with her contributions to creative writing, literary criticism, and studies in
feminist issues.
Currently Professor of English at UCLA, Allen continues to teach, write, and enlighten
others.
In addition to The Sacred
Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in AmericanIndian Traditions (1986),
Allen recently
published a collection of essays, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting,
Border-Crossing,and Loose
Canons (1998). She has also edited two other books of criticism, Studies in
American Indian Literature: Critical
Essays andCourses Designs (1983) and Spider Woman's
Granddaughters: TraditionalTales and Contemporary
Writing by Native American Women (1989).3 In addition to a collection
of stories and essays entitled Grandmothers of
theLight: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook (1991), Allen edited
From theCenter: A Folio: Native American Art and
Poetry (1981), Columbus andBeyond: Views from Native Americans
(1992), Voice of the Turtle: AmericanIndian
Literature, 1900-1970 (1995), and Song of the Turtle: AmericanIndian Literature, 1974-1994 (1996). She designed a
book called Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth (1993, by Jane
Caputi), and recently co-edited a
book for children, As Long As the RiversFlow: The Stories of Nine Native
Americans (1996).4 Allen's fiction includes
the novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), and novels- in-progress
entitled Raven's Road and The Seven
Generations. She has written numerous books of poetry, the most notable of which is
ShadowCountry (1982).5 Often
published by small presses, Allen's poetry is sometimes difficult to obtain, although many
anthologies contain large
portions of her books, and these are easily found in most libraries.6
The bibliographies I consulted for this
study cite the majority of Allen's principal texts, yet none includes a
comprehensive list of criticism about her. Therefore, I decided to concentrate my research on
works containing
criticism of Allen's writing (including dissertations and interviews, but excluding book
reviews).7 The CD-ROM
version of the MLA InternationalBibliography provided the basis for
my research, from which I compiled an
inventory of secondary works current to Fall 1997. I supplemented this information with
reference sources obtained in
the BibliographicIndex, such as The Reader's Adviser
and Native North AmericanLiterature, using each
bibliography I encountered as an additional checklist with which to compare my findings. The
organization of entries
is alphabetical by author or editor.

{32}
Aal, Katharyn Machan. Interview. "Writing As an Indian Woman: An Interview with Paula Gunn
Allen." North
Dakota Quarterly 57.2 (1989): 148-161.
Focuses on Allen's development as a
poet, influences such as Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, and the
creation of poetry in the oral tradition, which she composes with attention to how the poem will
sound in
performance. While poetry readings early in her career were directed to audiences composed
mainly of other poets,
Allen articulates the different, more satisfying reactions she experiences when performing within
the women's
community. She points out the insignificant status of poets (especially oral performers) in
America, but reveals the
mutual pleasure enjoyed by both poet and audience during lively performances.

Ballinger, Franchot and Brian Swann. Interview. "A MELUS Interview: Paula Gunn Allen."
MELUS 10.2 (1983): 3-25.
Interviewed in 1982, Allen states that
the woman-centeredness of Laguna culture is important to her work. On
the subject of language, she maintains that the perceptions of word associations and meanings for
English-speaking
Indians are often completely different from mainstream understandings. Allen denounces her
uncle John Gunn's
published Laguna stories as distortions, because he tried to make Lagunas "look like European
people." She is
concerned about the increasing violence against women, children, and old people on the
reservation. Regarding
feminism, Allen claims that white feminists fail to recognize cultural differences, wrongly
assuming a common
experience among all women regardless of ethnicity or class. She talks about the publishing
opportunities available to
Native American writers, stating that since people "learned about Indians from the media," the
market demands texts
about "not a human being, but a media Indian"--a "'sellable' Indian." Advocating for realistic
portrayals, Allen is
against the sentimentalization of Indians.

Bataille, Gretchen M. and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American IndianWomen: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1984. 140-141.
Describes autobiographical elements
in Allen's "experimental novel" The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. The
fictional main character, Ephanie, embodies real-life qualities of Allen, her mother, and her
grandmother, yet Allen
remains distanced from Ephanie through the use of the third person "she."

Boynton, Victoria. "Desire's Revision: Feminist Appropriation of Native American
Traditional Sources." Modern
Language Studies 26.2-3 {33} (1996):
53-71.
Applies the reading perspective of
"Barbie-Tonto," (the "white doll woman of America" combined with "your
Indian friend") to focus on the protagonist of Silko's Yellow Woman and Allen's
Kochinnenako in "Whirlwind Man
Steals Yellow Woman" (from Spider Woman'sGranddaughters). She
cites Allen's Sacred Hoop and briefly addresses
the "problems inherent in contemporary white readings of English translations of traditional
Native American tales."
However, Boynton is concerned with the appropriation and revision of traditional Native
American stories involving
kidnapping and rape of women, which she believes is questionable, disturbing, and potentially
damaging.

Bredin, Renae. "'Becoming Minor': Reading The Woman Who Owned theShadows." Studies in American Indian
Literatures 6.4 (1994): 36-50.
Addresses the idea of the reader's
identity in relation to the text, questioning the position of the reader as an
outsider--someone who is not self-described as Native American, lesbian, or feminine. Although
Allen writes her
novel in a genre rooted in "Anglo and Eurocentric traditions," she uses a technique of "the
narrative of the broken
sentence" (in which the sentence is fragmented, and the gaps and silences are infused with
meaning) to subvert the
"sign system of the oppressor." Allen creates an "essential Pan-Indian" through her retelling of
Native American
stories, which are Indian but not necessarily Keresan. Since Ephanie recounts several versions of
the story of The
Woman Who Fell From the Sky throughout the novel, culminating in the realization (epiphany)
that she is Sky
Woman, the novel itself can be viewed as "another telling of the Sky Woman story."

--. "Guerilla Ethnography." Diss. U of Arizona, 1995. DAI 56 (1995):
1774.
The work of writers Paula Gunn
Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Elsie Clews Parsons shares common elements
of place/location (Laguna Pueblo), discourses (fiction and ethnography), races (Laguna and
White), and gender
(female). Bredin investigates the interrelationship of domination and subordination,
demonstrating how non-white
writers reveal whiteness, which is a socially constructed category. The texts by these three Native
American authors
upset the "underlying assumption of whiteness as the given or natural center."

Bruchac, Joseph. Interview. "I Climb the Mesas in My Dreams." SurvivalThis Way: Interviews with American Indian
Poets. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987. 1-21.
In this 1983 interview, Allen speaks
about growing up--the wisdom {34}she learned from her Laguna mother,
her disillusionment with the lessons of the Church, and the value the Laguna place on learning. In
high school,
Gertrude Stein's work was a major influence, and later Robert Creeley's For Love
inspired Allen to begin creative
writing. Allen reveals that N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn "saved
my life" because it provided
reassurance and a sense of connection to her homeland. Concerning her own writing, Allen
discusses the significance
of shadows in Shadow Country, and the use of song structure in her poetry. On the
topic of being a "mixedblood," she
perceives "half-breed" authors as having a "mediational capacity that is not possessed by either of
the sides." Despite
feeling "essentially alienated," Allen notes that Indian writers are important for their "spiritual
vision" and declares
that "we can transform American culture."

Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
1983. 33-36.
Uses Allen's essay, "The Sacred
Hoop," which explains the main differences between Native American poetry
and traditional Western poetry, to ground an assertion that "most Indian poetry" has "strong
magical associations,"
especially through the use of repetition, brevity, and poetic language.

Champagne, Duane, ed. The Native North American Almanac: A ReferenceWork on Native North Americans in the
United States andCanada. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.
Brief paragraph on page 759 mentions
Allen's main works. Longer entry (pages 999-1000) provides biographical
information, remarking on Allen's efforts to educate others about Native American literature as
well as her
commitment to feminism.

Coltelli, Laura. Interview. "Paula Gunn Allen." Winged Words: AmericanIndian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1990. 11-39.
This 1985 interview begins with
Allen's thoughts on how acculturation has changed American Indian women's
lifestyles, and how she interweaves feminist issues with Native American studies. Recognizing
that tribes "have
always been sex-segregated in certain ways," Allen explains differences between male and
female writers, and she
claims that the works of both tend to be spiritual, use natural imagery, and speak about Indians.
Allen celebrates the
increasing number of Native writers, most importantly because they are defining Indian images
for themselves rather
than being pigeonholed and labeled by others. Specific authors are cited, including Allen's uncle
John Gunn, {35}
who translated Native stories "not only into English but into Western thought." Allen talks about
the people who have
influenced her, the writing process, and her works in progress, including Raven's
Road (a "medicine-dyke novel"),
research on Maronite people, and a poetry manuscript called "Soundings."

Dhairyam, Sagari. "'A House of Difference': Constructions of the Lesbian Poet in Audre
Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and
Paula Gunn Allen." Diss. U of Illinois, 1993. DAI 54 (1993): 1802.
Considers the genre of poetry as an
effective and appropriate "house for lesbian identity." Contends that critical
recognition of these poets' work is judged by rigid conventional literary criteria rather than their
activist agendas.
Examining poetry by "a black Lorde, a white Rich, and a red Allen," Dhairyam strives to
"celebrate lesbian identity in
the context of post-structuralist thought," believing that there is reciprocal nurturance between
the performative
aspects of poetry and alternate identities.

Draper, James P. "Paula Gunn Allen." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol.
84. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. 1-47.
A brief introduction summarizing the
critical reception of Allen's work states that her poetry is "recognized for
its musical qualities" and her novel is "praised for its examination of racism and sexism."
Although her nonfiction is
occasionally faulted for lack of documentation, Allen "attempts to preserve Native American
culture for all
individuals regardless of their ethnic heritage." The remaining forty-six pages of criticism contain
essays, two
interviews8 , and an excerpt from Elizabeth Hanson's book (see entry below). The
books reviewed are: TheWoman
Who Owned the Shadows, Studies in American Indian Literature,
The Sacred Hoop, Spider Woman's
Granddaughters, Skinsand Bones, and Grandmothers
of the Light.

Eysturoy, Annie O. Interview. "Paula Gunn Allen." This is About Vision:Interviews with Southwestern Writers. Eds.
William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
1990. 95-107.
Conducted in 1987, the interview
begins with Allen's thoughts on the importance of the Southwestern landscape
in her writing, and the idea that nature-potent, diverse, rugged and sublime-epitomizes her
concept of femininity. She
reveals her early desire to be an actress, which out of necessity evolved into a writing career,
inspired by the work and
teaching of Robert Creeley. She also speaks about the process of writing as a way to "find out
who you are," and the
impor-{36}tance for all individuals to understand their
heritage. Allen believes that "you must accept all your
identities . . . the more cultures you have, the greater your range." She also advocates
"gynocratic" or "gynocentric"
communities in which "femaleness or femininity is the central cultural value" rather than
"matriarchy," which
connotes a woman-dominated society. Includes discussion of The Woman WhoOwned the Shadows and Allen's new
novel, Raven's Road, which explores a theme of the nuclear bomb as a way to
cleanse the planet.

Ferrell, Tracy J. Prince. "Transformation, Myth, and Ritual in Paula Gunn Allen's
Grandmothers of the Light." North
Dakota Quarterly, 63.1 (1996): 77-88.
Emphasizes Allen's search for
self-definition and her evolving ideology. Most of her work incorporates oral
tradition, seems instructional, and encourages readers to open their minds and think differently.
Specifically,
Grandmothers of the Light is a guidebook for personal transformation and it
"demands that America re-evaluate its
concept of Native people and cultures." Ferrell claims that although Allen is "trying to unlearn
'western patriarchal'
influences, she will never be able to escape them entirely and present a cleaned slate, reinscribed
with an originary
Native nature." However, Ferrell acknowledges the value of Allen's technique of integrating
Native American myth
with Western influences.

Hanson, Elizabeth. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise: Boise State UP, 1990.
This fifty page booklet begins with
biographical information, stressing Allen's position as a "breed," because she
identifies with two cultural communities but will always remain an outsider. The work of Leslie
Marmon Silko, also a
Keresan-speaking Laguna Pueblo, addresses similar themes concerning the "breed's" struggle for
identity. The second
section analyzes Allen's nonfiction, beginning with an examination of Studies in American
Indian Literature, which is
a teacher's guide that demonstrates the importance of reading Native American literature within
the context of
community and ceremony rather than interpreting it through the "white man's" perspective.
TheSacred Hoop is
criticized for departing from the premises of Studies to adopt a "woman-focused
world view." The subsequent
sections deal with the early poetry; the feminist poetry; Shadow Country; and
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows,
which is compared to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Concludes with a selected
bibliography of works by and about
Allen.

--. "Shadows in Paula Gunn Allen's Shadow Country." ARIEL
25.2 (1994): {37}49-55.
In her Shadow Country
poems, Allen tries to "contain and reconcile the complexities of the white/Native
American experience." She establishes herself as a mediator or peacemaker through her
mixedblood identity ("self
divided against itself"), essentially uniting opposites. Allen evokes memories of Native American
peacefulness as a
model for individual harmony, hoping readers will be inspired to "transform their shared culture"
away from discord
to a "sacred terrain."

Holford, Vanessa. "Re Membering Ephanie: A Woman's Re-Creation of Self in Paula Gunn
Allen's The Woman Who
Owned the Shadows." Studies in American Indian Literatures 6.1 (1994):
99-113.
Through Allen's presentation of
Ephanie's quest for self-discovery and self-preservation, her writing technique
has the "potential for self-actualization" because Allen's use of fragmented discourse (jumping
"from thought to
thought, scene to scene, without transition or explanation") is a form of "feminine writing," as
delineated by the
French feminist Hélène Cixous. In answer to some critics' denunciation of
lesbian relationships in the novel, Holford
points out that Ephanie "seeks spiritual union with both men and women, but in her case it is
Elena and later Teresa
with whom she achieves the twinning she seeks to create her own identity." Views Teresa as
representing "both
woman's love for other women and the possibility of a feminine unity that transcends race."
Allen retells traditional
Indian stories, incorporating Western influences, hoping to present a "unified world view which
allows for differences
instead of punishing them."

Jahner, Elaine. "A Laddered, Rain-bearing Rug: Paula Gunn Allen's Poetry." Eds. Helen
Winter Stauffer and Susan J.
Rosowski. Women andWestern American Literature. New York:
Whitston, 1982. 311-26.
Explicates poetry from Coyote's
Daylight Trip, concentrating on the prevalence of traditional mythology,
explaining that myth helps people to understand the world, seeing it in new ways, and teaches
about the "creative
powers of the universe." Designates Allen as a "desert writer," which is evident through her use
of landscape-related
terminology to describe emotional states. Additionally, Allen creates "'mythic space' where
people can confront the
truth of their own and others' existence," a place of refuge where one can experience personal
growth and rebirth.

Jaskoski, Helen. "Allen's Grandmother." Explicator 50 (1992): 247-50.
Analyzes the poem "Grandmother,"
focusing on line 15: "the women and the men weave blankets into tales of
life." Argues that the speaker {38} (not to be confused
with the poet) is "emphatically ungendered or androgynous."
Draws a parallel of the poet represented as spider in Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient
Spider" and the blanket as a
figure of androgyny in a Pueblo poem called "Song of the Sky Loom." Considers knowledge of
Laguna/Pueblo
traditions an essential prerequisite to understanding Allen's intended meaning.

Jenkins, Linda Walsh. "A Gynocratic Feminist Perspective and the Case of Kopit's
Indians." Theatre and Feminist
Aesthetics. Eds. Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
UP, 1995. 82-99.
Adopts Allen's explication of
"recovering the feminine in American Indian Traditions" from The Sacred Hoop to
develop a "gynocratic" reading of Kopit's 1968 play Indians. Viewing Native
American belief systems as generally
nonoppressive and life-affirming, Jenkins interprets Allen's explanation of the gynocratic
worldview as: balanced and
unified with nature, with the earth itself being feminine; a spirit-centered universe; a collective
and individual
coexistence; and a natural, ceremonial concept of time. Applying this perspective to
Indians, Jenkins argues that
prevailing discourse continues to be male-dominated, oppressive, and destructive to
spiritually-based gynocratic
attitudes and practices.

Karrer, Wolfgang. "Nostalgia, Amnesia, and Grandmothers: The Uses of Memory in Albert
Murray, Sabine Ulibarri,
Paula Gunn Allen, and Alice Walker." Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in
EthnicAmerican Literatures.
Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern UP,
1994. 135-44.
Allen employs myth and ceremony in
her novel The Woman WhoOwned the Shadows to achieve positive
transformation of the protagonist, Ephanie, who "simultaneously recovers her individual and
collective past as a
Native American woman." Effectively emulating Spider Grandmother through her "patient
weaving of recurrent key
words," Allen invokes old sacred stories, demonstrating their value and healing power within
contemporary society.

Keating, AnaLouise. "Back to the Mother? Paula Gunn Allen's Origin Myths."
Women Reading Women Writing:
Self-Invention in PaulaGunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre
Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 93-117.
Points out the limited academic
reception of Allen's work, which seems to parallel the "extremity of her claims,"
scant factual supporting evidence, as well as prevailing elitist standards of scholarship. Yet
Allen's {39} use and
retelling of woman-centered creation myths is valuable because origin stories help people to
recognize their ties to the
past and, consequently, they can have a better understanding of the present and future.
Developing new ways of
thinking, Allen avoids dualism as she intertwines the mind, body, and spirit, and departs from
Western concepts of
femininity and motherhood. Allen's writing affirms a "'feminine' mestizaje." (Feminine signifies
"re-metaphorized
images of Woman" and mestizaje is evident through "fluid, transformational, transcultural
forms.") Believing literal
interpretations are too limiting, Keating expands Allen's own reading of origin myths, asserting
they should be read
performatively as "transformational metaphors."

Keating, AnnLouise. "Myth Smashers, Myth Makers: (Re)Visionary Techniques in the
Works of Paula Gunn Allen,
Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde." Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of
Color. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson.
New York: Haworth, 1993: 73-95.
Examines these authors to reveal the
way in which "they challenge the cultural stereotypes that silence women of
color by denying their access to language." Keating discusses Allen's use of the Laguna Pueblo
tradition's creatrix
figure of Old Spider Woman/Thought Woman, which is a nonwestern allusion. Allen's process of
"revisionist
mythmaking" is a technique that provides "radical alternatives to the existing social structures."
Old Spider
Woman/Thought Woman embodies intellectual power and creativity, yet she creates through the
process of thinking
rather than giving birth (a typically western, patriarchal notion). "Allen's goal is transformation"
because she "attempts
to alter her readers' worldviews" through the creation of alternate myths.

Lang, Nancy Helene. "Through Landscape Toward Story/Through Story Toward Landscape:
A Study of Four Native
American Women Poets." Diss. Indiana U of Pennsylvania, 1991. DAI 52 (1991):
918.
Studies the poetry of Paula Gunn
Allen, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Wendy Rose, claiming that the content and
significance of each writer's work reflects her mixedblood identity and the "multi-voiced
discourse of their poems
resonate[s] with multi-layered meanings." Images of Native American traditions and cultural
practices are juxtaposed
with current urban social problems. Although necessarily written in English, which is the "'alien'
language of the
conqueror," the narrative combination of traditional and contemporary forms creates "powerful
statements of place."

Lincoln, Kenneth. "Now Day Indi'ns." Native American Renaissance. {40} Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 214-21.
Allen's identity as "half breed" places
her in "that marginal zone of interfusions, neither the shadower, nor the
shadowed, both and neither, in liminal transition." Addresses the poetry of Shadow
Country, consistently comparing
Allen's life with her writing. Concentrating on her sense of isolation from both Native American
and white cultures,
Lincoln highlights the theme of alienation. Allen's poetry shatters "stereotypes of blood warriors
and demure squaws"
with "women foregrounded," but her feminism is "older" because it focuses on woman's work.
Lincoln recognizes
"echoes of Whitman" and other Romantic poets in Allen's writing.

Perry, Donna. Interview. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 1-18.
Interviewed in June 1990, Allen talks
about her diverse background and the influence of music (Indian, Arabic,
Roman Catholic, and Mexican) on her writing. She attributes the increase in Native American
literary studies to
various factors, most importantly the work of writer N. Scott Momaday in the 1960s and the
Modern Language
Association's investigation into "discrete literatures" in 1970. Allen says her goal in The
Woman Who Owned the
Shadows was to "make Indian people real, not oddities, not curiosities." Gertrude Stein's
writing had a major impact
on Allen during high school, and she attributes the "rhythms" of her novel to Stein's influence.
Allen's work deals
with Indians' "contribution to feminism--the tradition of strong, autonomous, self-defining
women." Lastly, she
reveals her concern that all Native peoples (worldwide) are in danger. Allen hopes the next
century will allow for "a
real dialogue about what happened [to indigenous populations] and what is still happening. We
need to make it stop."

Purdy, John. Interview. "'And Then, Twenty Years Later . . .': A Conversation with Paula
Gunn Allen." Studies in
American IndianLiteratures 9.3 (1997). 5-16.
In this 1997 interview from
SAIL's "Twentieth-Anniversary Issue on the Flagstaff Conference on Native
American Literatures," Allen is excited by the increased recognition of Native writers in the
literary {41}field over
the past twenty years. Remarking that Native American work should not be designated and
studied as "minority" or
"multicultural literature," Allen believes it should be categorized as simply American literature.
She explains that
unlike other ethnic writing, most Native American work is "literature of the spirit or the literature
of ritual" rather than
writing focused mainly on oppression. Commenting that in the future she plans to divert her
attention from strictly
literary matters to concentrate on more spiritual issues, Allen reveals her current writing project,
The Seven
Generations, which is about Native spiritual systems.

Reuman, Ann E.9 "Paula Gunn Allen." Native American Writers of
theUnited States. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. 11-20.
Lists primary works and biographical
information, addressing Allen's role as "mediator," which is informed by
her rich, diverse upbringing, and mentions her commitment to the Native American community.
As a writer, Allen
"struggles to negotiate multiple, often contentious, worldviews and urges white, Western,
patriarchal culture to
revalue and remember a Native American worldview from which it has become estranged and
from which it has
much to learn." Reveals Allen's literary influences, especially Momaday's House Made of
Dawn; her education and
teaching career; and the development of her complex, non-Western style and utilization of oral
tradition. Detailed
discussion of both the autobiographical novel The Woman Who Owned theShadows and The Sacred Hoop (which
Reuman believes can be read as companion to the novel), with brief comments about
Grandmothersof the Light,
Spider Woman's Granddaughters, Voice of the Turtle and As
Long as the Rivers Flow.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction,Bibliographic Review, and Selected
Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990. 92-94.
Comments on Allen's feminist
perspective and use of a southwestern setting in The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows,10 describing the novel as the "journey toward spiritual rebirth."
Praises Allen's poetry as insightful,
well-written, and powerful.

Ruppert, Jim. "Paula Gunn Allen and Joy Harjo: Closing the Distance Between Personal and
Mythic Space."
American Indian Quarterly 7.1 (1983): 27-40.
Analyzes poetry from Coyote's
Daylight Trip (1978) and Star Child (1981), concentrating on Allen's
representation of the individual's search for meaning and significance in a barren world, and
defines the term "mythic
space" as "the fusion of person, spirit, and land." Allen reaches the realm of mythic space
internally, through the
"imagination and the senses," and creates "effective poetic structures designed to open the
perceptions of readers." A
reader is able to discover the significance of his or her own life through the poet's search for
meaning, which is
informed by an "understanding inherent in Native American experience."

Ryan, John Barry. "Listening to Native Americans: Making Peace with the Past for the
Future." Listening: Journal of
Religion and Culture 31.1 (1996): 24-36.
Addresses the development of a
college course in Native American religions, recognizing the importance of
reading Native literature in order to "make visible what had been largely invisible although
present all around us."
Cites Allen's Studies in American Indian Literature and recommends Spider
Woman's Granddaughters because it
incorporates some of the "best in Native American creative writing." Valuing Spider
Woman's Granddaughters for
the shared consciousness of its contributors, Ryan describes Allen's introduction as "scathing,"
although he
acknowledges the importance of "listening" to a dissimilar collection of Native American
voices.

St. Clair, Janet. "Uneasy Ethnocentrism: Recent Works of Allen, Silko, and Hogan."
Studies in American Indian
Literatures 6.1 (1994): 83-98.
Touches on an inconsistency in
Allen's career in which she "complains that Leslie Silko had ethically violated
the legendary privacy of the Lagunas by including sacred clan stories in her novel
Ceremony." Yet Allen subsequently
published "a collection of sacred stories {43} drawn
from many North American tribal traditions" in Grandmothersof
the Light. St. Clair argues that recent works by Allen (and other Native American writers)
can be perceived as
ethnocentric because tribal lifestyles are portrayed as spiritual and community-oriented, whereas
whites are
stereotyped as "monstrous perversions of human ideologies." While "monolithic labels and
stereotypical assumptions
are not altogether fair . . . they are entirely understandable" because "indigenous traditions can
serve as models for
postmodern reconstruction." Allen's Native American, feminist message is conveyed through the
language of Western
tradition, yet she offers a hopeful perspective transcending the "stubborn boundaries of culture,
gender, class and
race."

Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to AmericanIndian Texts. Berkeley: U of California P,
1993. 124-30.
Claims that in The Sacred
Hoop, Allen "replicates in practice what she sets out to criticize." Suggests that in the
section "Women as Healers, Dreamers, and Shamans" (in the chapter "How the West Was Really
Won"), Allen
simply summarizes the interviews with Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish rather than allowing
either woman to have
"an individual voice represented in the text." Therefore, readers may question the accuracy of
many of Allen's texts
because she interprets the experiences of these women, formulating generalizations that discredit
an individual's
perspective.

Scarberry, Susan J. "Grandmother Spider's Lifeline." Studies in AmericanIndian Literature: Critical Essays and
Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: MLA, 1983.
Both creatrix and protector,
Grandmother Spider weaves a web (representing "wholeness, balance, and beauty")
through imagination, and her acts are emulated by her people. Although Western cultures tend to
rebuke the
Grandmother Spider figure, she is a source of inspiration for many Native American poets.
Focusing on this image,
Scarberry discusses the following works by Allen: "Women's Day 1975," "Affirmation,"
"Ephanie" (in Shantih), and
"Grandmother."

Sevillano, Mando. "Interpreting Native American Literature: An Archetypal Approach."
American Indian Culture and
Research Journal 10.1 (1986): 1-12.
Disputes Allen's argument in her essay
"The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Indian Perspective on American
Indian Literature,"11 in which she contends that Native American literature
requires an "ethnic approach" to criticism.
Sevillano illustrates parallels between Chris-{44}tian/western and Native belief systems, and cites Carl Jung's
model
of the collective unconscious to establish that "the existence of certain universal archetypes
seems self-evident."
Recounting a Hopi story called "Poowak Wuhti," Sevillano identifies two universal archetypes:
the unfaithful wife (a
destructive force) and the wise old woman (a spiritual guide). Relating the Hopi wise woman to
the Christian Holy
Spirit, he concludes that Allen's more narrow critical approach to Native American literature
does not allow for a
"plurality of interpretations."

Shi, Jian. "Healing through Traditional Stories and Storytelling in Contemporary
Native-American Fiction." Diss.
Lehigh U 1995. DAI 56 (1995): 3964.
Discusses the healing power of
storytelling in Momaday's HouseMade of Dawn, Welch's
Winter in the Blood,
Silko's Ceremony, and Allen's The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows. Asserts that Momaday and Welch search in the
past for answers, whereas Silko and Allen look to the future for solutions to American Indians'
problems.

Smith, Patricia Clark. "Coyote's Sons, Spider's Daughters: Western American Indian Poetry,
1968-1983." A Literary
History of the AmericanWest. Ed. J. Golden Taylor. Fort Worth: Texas
Christian UP, 1987. 1075- 76.
Brief section concerning Allen's
portrayal of Sacagawea (a Shoshoni Indian who assisted the Lewis and Clark
Expedition in the Pacific Northwest) in "The One Who Skins Cats." Contrary to conventional
textbook
representations of Sacagawea as passive and compliant, Allen depicts her as a "tough, witty,
wise, uncompromising realist."
TallMountain, Mary. "Paula Gunn
Allen's 'The One Who Skins Cats': An Inquiry into Spiritedness." Studies in
American Indian Literatures 5.2 (1993): 34-38.
Examines Allen's poems about three
famous Native women: Pocahontas, La Malinche, and Sacagawea. Citing
traditional historical accounts as stereotypical, TallMountain contends that Allen's depiction is
more insightful.
Despite the fact that each of the "heroic" women was rejected by her own people, Allen portrays
them as "possessed
by spiritedness," and she celebrates how each was able to carry out her obligatory commitment to
guide explorers.

Van Dyke, Annette. "Curing Ceremonies: The Novels of Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula
Gunn Allen." The Search
for a Woman-CenteredSpirituality. New York: New York UP, 1992.
12-40.
Uses the argument and examples cited
in "The Journey Back to Female Roots: A Laguna Pueblo Model" (see
entry below) to compare Silko's Ceremony and Allen's The Woman Who
Owned the Shadows, both of which are seen
as "curing ceremonies." Despite the gender difference of the main characters--Tayo is male
(Silko) and Ephanie is
female (Allen)--each "half-breed's" experiences are very similar. The most notable divergence is
the way in which
Ephanie and Tayo react to "division from self, from the land, the Mother." In both novels,
balance is restored to the
community, and Tayo and Ephanie are healed when each reconnects with the female principle,
which is represented
by Thought Woman.

--. "The Journey Back to Female Roots: A Laguna Pueblo Model." LesbianTexts and Contexts. Eds. Karla Jay and
Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York UP, 1990. 339-54.
Indicates the importance of Laguna
culture in Allen's work, and defines the Pueblo worldview as "based on the
concept that all things inanimate and animate are related and are part of the whole." European
invasion, which
brought an ideology of human superiority over all creation, disrupted this harmonious worldview.
However,
ceremonies facilitate healing, and for the Laguna, "storytelling often functions as a ceremony for
curing." The Woman
Who Owned the Shadows itself can be seen as a curing ceremony because it is about a
journey to healing. The
traditional tribal tales are ineffective because they do not incorporate the changes brought about
by whites, and the
stories must be told "according to the requirements of the listeners." Allen seeks to "restore
balance to the
community-at-large" because the novel offers non-Indian readers a fresh "non-Euro-American
perspective."

--. "Paula Gunn Allen." Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the U.S.: A
Bio-bibliographicalCritical Sourcebook. Eds.
Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Includes biographical information and
brief analysis of Allen's major {46} works. Highlights
her predominant
themes, such as a woman-centered culture, rebirth, the power of oral tradition, healing, and
transformation. Critics
have focused on Allen's feminist issues and often neglect her lesbian themes, an omission which
seems to "indicate a
homophobic reaction and, perhaps, a heterosexual blindness to Allen's work." Van Dyke believes
Allen's lesbian
content merits more recognition.

--. "Paula Gunn Allen." Notable Native Americans. Ed. Sharon Malinowski.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. 6-9.
This sketch provides information
about Allen's heritage, upbringing in Albuquerque, education, and professional
career. Allen's criticism and poetry are rooted in the woman-centered culture of Laguna Pueblo,
which emphasizes
women's power, identification with myth, and connection to the sacred. Discusses the various
sources and influences
which contribute to the "multicultural vision" of Allen's work. (Includes a list of selected writings
by Allen and
secondary sources.)

Witalec, Janet. "Paula Gunn Allen." Native North American Literature:Biographical and Critical Information on
Native Writers and Oratorsfrom the United States and Canada. Ed. Jeffrey
Chapman. New York: Gale Research,
1994. 125-133.
Introduction provides biographical
information and commentary about Allen's main themes of assimilation,
self-identity, remembrance, and the quest for spiritual wholeness, and states that generally her
work has received
positive criticism. Following a list of her major works is a section of criticism, with excerpts
from Jim Ruppert's
"Paula Gunn Allen and Joy Harjo: Closing the Distance between Personal and Mythic Space,"
and Elizabeth Hanson's
Paula Gunn Allen (see entries above), ending with a brief list of "Sources for
Further Study."

Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989.
Boston: Beacon, 1990.
Chapter 5, "Community and
Difference," claims that "all lesbian literature is mythic," maintaining that since
"myth helps heal the wounds caused by fragmentation, women of color and ethnic women draw
upon their cultures'
rich and distinctive mythic languages to construct a self." Explicates the metaphor of falling in
Allen's novel TheWoman Who Owned the Shadows. Just as Spiderwoman/Great Mother is a
counterpart to the writer (Allen), Ephanie's
alter ego is The Woman Who Fell, another mythic figure from Native American legend.
Zimmerman explains that
"having jumped and fallen, Ephanie is once again able to dream," because falling and jumping
signify the
aban-{47}donment of old ways in favor of the
risk-taking which is necessary to achieve wholeness.

NOTES

From interview with Annie O. Eysturoy.

N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for
fiction in 1969, stimulating public
interest in Native American Literature. Allen's cites Momaday as a major influence, especially
because his writing
provided Allen with reassurance and a sense of connection to her native homeland.

Spider Woman's Granddaughters won the American Book Award from the
Before Columbus Foundation in 1990.

As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans is
co-edited with Patricia Clark Smith, who
was Allen's dissertation chair and is author of "Coyote's Sons, Spider's Daughters: Western
American Indian
Poetry, 1968-1983" (see entry above).

Allen's books of poetry include: The Blind Lion (1974),
Coyote'sDaylight Trip (1978), A Cannon Between My
Knees (1981), Star Child (1981), Shadow Country (1982),
Wyrds (1987), Skins and Bones (1988), and Life is a
Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995. She is working on a poetry manuscript called
"Soundings."

Some anthologies containing Allen's poetry include: A Circle of Nations:Voices and Visions of American Indians,
The Desert is NoLady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and
Art, EarthPower Coming: Short
Fiction in Native American Literature, FourIndian Poets,
Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native AmericanPoetry, Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary NativeWomen's Writing of North America, The
Remembered Earth: An Anthologyof Contemporary Native American
Literature, Smoke Rising:The Native North
American Literary Companion, Songs fromThis Earth on Turtle's
Back: An Anthology of Poetry by AmericanIndian Writers, That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry andFiction by Native American Women, and The
Third Woman: MinorityWomen Writers of the U.S. Additionally, an
autobiographical essay, "The Autobiography
of a Confluence," is contained in I Tell YouNow.

Contains Kenneth Lincoln's essay, "The Now Day Indi'ns," Annette Van Dyke's "The
Journey Back to Female
Roots: A Laguna Pueblo Model," and a portion of Jim Ruppert's "Paula Gunn Allen and Joy
Harjo: Closing the
Distance between Personal and Mythic Space." Interviews included are from Joseph Bruchac's
Survival This Way:Interviews with American Indian Poets and Annie O. Eysturoy's This is
About Vision.

Ann E. Reuman's article, "Walking in Balance: Dialogic Differences and the Potency of
Relationship in Paula
Gunn Allen's The WomanWho Owned the Shadows," is forthcoming
in Border Crossings: WorldFeminisms in
Dialogue (edited by Merry Pawlowski).

Refers to the protagonist as Epiphanie rather than Ephanie. In the novel, her name is
discussed: "But like her it was
a split name, a name half of this and half of that: Epiphany. Effie. An almost name. An almost
event. Proper at that
for her, a halfblood. A halfbreed" (TheWoman Who Owned the Shadows
3).

Allen's essay, "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Indian Perspective on American Indian
Literature," is in
Chapman, Literature of theAmerican Indians: Views and
Interpretations.

What is left of the burning
barrels
and buffalo chips that fueled our
dreams
is at the end of your cigarette,
the only light within five miles.
And the stars are not out
tonight.
The night is just a smell
of burning tobacco.
Comanche County ends on a gravel
road,
underneath a pick-up truck.
We lie cross-legged with the
dark,
stealing tribal license plates
and reinventing horse-capture
songs
with screwdrivers.
And when you inhale,
we exist only as an orange glow
with a manhood built
out of these stolen plates.
For you, morning will be tribal
princesses
being carried away by yellow
beads
sewed into the shape of
horse-legs.
For me, it's bolts and winged
nuts
of dismantled horses.
The mercy where sunlight,
like brilliant swords in diagonal
swing,
takes us by the neck.

"You still got
some film in your camera, Will? I want to get a picture of us standing over Custer's grave . . .
."
"I'll bet Custer wasn't even close at
half-time. . ."
Harlen laughed and slapped his legs.
"Hell, Will, Crazy Horse slam-dunked that bastard. Whoooeeee, slam-dunk."
"Time-out," I shouted. "That's what
Custer was yelling when all those Indians came riding out of the hills."
"Time out," shouted Harlen.
We missed the turnoff.

Thomas King, Medicine
River1

Medicine River is a town at rest
on the "broad back of the prairies," Thomas King writes in his novel of the same
title (1). This town, King continues, is "an unpretentious community of buildings banked low
against the weather that
slides off the eastern face of the Rockies" (1). Like High River, or maybe Medicine Hat, Alberta
(farther east), the text
called MedicineRiver invokes historical correspondences without
wanting to be reduced to them. The novel moves as
a metaphor between Indian (or Native) history and its representation, and everywhere it raises the
issue of the
negotiation and relation between the two.
As a metaphor for Native experience,
the title of the novel also suggests the overall representational project of
the text. In the creative gap established between "official History" (with a capital "H") of Indian
or Native experience,
and an individual's personal experience of it, there is a {52}tribal
photographer furiously re-inventing memories on
silver nitrate plates and, ultimately, wondering which side of the camera he is on. The narrator of
the novel, Will,
doesn't wonder long; he discovers that the representation of the town Medicine River mandates
his presence on both
sides of the lens as well as on both sides of the discourse the lens creates: subject and object,
white father and Native
mother, status and non-status, urban and reserve, Native and Canadian.
The story begins with Will recounting
his first glimpse at photos in an old box inherited from his mother, a
Blackfoot woman who lived and recently died in this town that abuts the Blackfoot reserve
somewhere in
southwestern Alberta. These "photographs in a box" offer stories to the narrator throughout the
novel. After locating
pictures of his mother, Rose Horse-Capture, Will finds "one of an old man with braids sitting in a
straight-backed
chair on the edge of a coulee" (4), a man Will learns is his maternal grandfather.
Will's process of unearthing each
photo's meaning, the stories that each brings into personal context, serves to
accumulate the shared history of the town and reserve, the network of intra-tribal relationships,
and the role of Will's
witness for the novel's readers. This gradual elaboration of meaning, of family and history,
accretes in King's text
associatively through a proliferation of shared tribal images. This association of what King
elsewhere refers to as "all
my relations," rather than an express definition of what Medicine River "is," or what its people
"are" in photographed
form, takes pictures of tribal identities out of museums, and off coffee tables, and puts them back
into the hands of
communities that give them meaning.2
As texts of relation, I argue that the
pictures Will "discovers," much like those that he will subsequently shoot,
offer King's critique of photographic realism in the text. As has been suggested by recent
scholarship, "photographic
realism" may be considered the alliance of photographic technologies with literary genres of
American realism
(including romanticism).3 With origins in nineteenth-century representations of
"the noble savage," this alliance of
discourse and technology persists in representing tribal identities and cultures as artifacts of their
own inevitable
disappearance, the history of Anglo-European genocide conveniently cropped out. Photographic
realism on the
so-called "frontier," in Native country, establishes fundamental rules of representation, rules that
typically, until the
last generation or so, excluded subjectivities and identities for whom the "real" has been,
distinctly (and often
violently) different. The literary mode of American realism--from tragic romance to dismissive
essentialisms {53}
about what tribal identities are "really" like--has been nothing less than the discursive strongman
of Anglo-European colonization.
The tribal revitalization of the
photographic image undertaken by King's text transgresses the lineage of
photocolonialism associated with camera technologies that began in the nineteenth-century on
both sides of the 49th
parallel. Photographic technologies were instrumental in the military conquest of tribal
communities (including the
hunting down of tribal fugitives), indispensable to the so-called "Great [American] Surveys"
prior to allotment of
tribal lands, and concurrent with attacks on tribal cultures once military conquest was achieved.
Warriors in service to
colonialist discourses of conquest, assimilation and termination, Alexander Gardner, Louis
Herman Heller, William
Henry Jackson, Frank Hamilton Cushing, James Mooney and, after 1895, Edward Sheriff
Curtis--among many
others--participated in projects the ostensible "ethnological" imperatives of which dove-tailed
with the expansionist
and capitalist economy of the newly imperialist American power.4 While the
Anglo-Canadian history of colonization
brings important differences to the American version of genocide, photocolonialism offered a
necessary and lucrative
support to the popular invention of the West in both nations; the alliance between visual media
and popular culture
was early established as necessary to the political and cultural agenda of white supremacy on
both sides of the
Medicine Line.
Yet Medicine River
does not preoccupy itself solely with disabusing readers of the innocence of photography
as a
tool attending colonialism, nor limit itself to applauding the notion of "First Nation Photography"
(100) as overdue
compensation for lack of tribal representation within established media such as photography
(although both points are
important). The ironic inversion invited by the notion of an Indian photographer cannot alone
account for the text's
power; indeed, it becomes clear that King's text challenges the mode of irony as an insufficient
literary response to the
complex dimensionality of Indian representation. For instance, that Indians believe ghosts return
from the dead in
pictures is a persistently racist truism that, in ironic terms, haunts Indian encounters with
technologies, reducing them
to the status of victim rather than agent. King's text may be read as a lengthy rebuttal of this
position, that held by the
Anglo-Canadian in the novel who suggests to Will that it is "Kind of ironic, isn't it? I mean,
being a photographer . . .
. You know . . . the way Indians feel about photographs" (229).
Rather than validating irony as a
legitimate form of tribal critique, Medicine River rises above irony by offering a
compelling metanarrative {54}of realist photography. The novel presents a self-reflexive text
in pictures about what
pictures can and cannot achieve as frames around, or borders onto, tribal discourses. Amidst "all
my relations,"
Medicine River re-inserts the tribal relation into photographs, puts back stories that
have fallen out of the picture,
stories that, in the absence of meaningful historical relationships, run the risk of becoming
confused with the pictures themselves.
The realist, often romantic, discourses
invoked by Edward Curtis' coffee table portraits explode in the materiality
of the present of MedicineRiver where the adult Will, after sufficient
cajoling by Harlen Bigbear, establishes the
town's only Native-owned photography studio. Despite Will's protests at the idea, the fulfillment
of which entails
Will's leaving the community and life in Toronto, Harlen is persistent: "No Indian photographers
[in town], Will. Real
embarrassing for us to have to go to a white for something intimate like a picture. Bertha says
you got a lot of
relatives on the reserve. You think they'd go to a stranger for their photography needs when they
can go to family?" (95).
At the beginning of the story, Will's
witness--via the lens--seems merely documentary. Apparently Harlen
Bigbear, the likable and dogged champion of community planning, as well as unflagging enemy
of entropy within the
narrative, gets most of the credit for keeping relationships together in Medicine River. Yet Will,
too, has an important
function in town. In a tidy division of labor, Harlen orchestrates much of the narrative, and at
weddings, funerals, and
impromptu photo shoots, Will records it. Moreover, by means of a stylistic in the text that
crosscuts Will's childhood
memories of 1950s-era termination policies in Canada with contemporary events in town, Will
directs the gaze of his
audience away from linear narrative while still framing important associations that link present to
past. For example,
the mysterious suicide of Jake Pretty Weasel, a wife beater in town (43), emerges in a diptych
alongside Will's
childhood memories of another eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Oswald, whose misplaced faith in ideals
of Canadian
liberalism suffers underneath her own husband's blows (48).
Will, like Harlen, "keeps track" of
community events, and both are "somehow reassuring" at the community
events each attends (47). Nevertheless, Will's role as tribal cultural historian, we discover by
story's end, necessitates
breaking down the enlightenment perspective and objectivity of such a historical remove,
necessitating Will's
participation within the frame of tribal histories. To this end, King's project in
Medicine River moves beyond the
photographic frame of reference associated with Will's {55} witness to contest the ontology--the self-referential
realism--of the photographic text. Indeed, King's text reminds us early and often that
photographic realism and the
prophetic verisimilitude it seems to offer only exist through an artful (re)arrangement of any
photo's historical contents.
Even before photos emerge in the
story as text-objects bearing the special burden of absent history, the issue of
representation writ large, of how meaning is made graphically, cues the cultural work Will
undertakes later in the
darkroom. Will's brother, James, an accomplished artist at an early age, possesses the artistic
talent in the family: "My
lines were stiff and crude. James tried to help me, but I just couldn't see what he saw" (12). James
makes beautiful
pictures that the neighbor kid, Henry, defaces with cartoon characters (21). James isn't rattled at
all. He says, "I can
make them as big as I want . . . . And I can draw eagles over and over again" (21). The two
brothers get a large piece
of butcher paper, James draws an eagle on it, and they hang it out their bedroom window. "The
rain came first and
soaked the butcher's paper and plastered it to the side of the building. The wind came a few days
later and tore the
drawing loose. Some of the ink bled through, and for a long time after, you could see a faint
outline of the eagle in the
brick. James could draw. He really could" (21). Here the inexhaustibility of James' own creation
is linked to what the
text tells us about the "ink bleeding through." James' art imparts permanence to representation, to
graphesis as an
historical act, even--or especially--when the materiality of a specific representation is
threatened.
Maydean, another of Will's childhood
neighbors, signifies inexhaustibly, too; she is developmentally disabled,
and it is apparently her body, rather than speech, that imparts the text of her difference. She hugs
hard and "slobbers";
she gives "embarrassing hugs" (193). Presuming Maydean's "retarded" (192) immunity from
what is spoken and
written, the boys ignore her "as though she wasn't there," "as if she didn't exist" (193).
Consequently, she "goes wild"
one day and tries to erase an unflattering image one of the other children has drawn of her. Will
recounts that she used
"her bare hands, and she got most of it off, but not before she cut her hands on the concrete. They
didn't bleed much,
but you could see the faint fan of blood on the wall" (193-4).
Part of Will's coming of age appears
to be his understanding of an indelible history attending any act of
representation, however ephemeral such an act may at first appear. The "faint fan of [Maydean's]
blood on the wall,"
like James' "faint outline on the brick" invokes the historical stakes and conditions of all
representation. History
imparts an ethical trace that violates every so-called neutral or objective representation of "what
hap-{56}pened"; you
can't erase it, kill it off, or put it inside a reserve. Attending representation, history necessarily
transgresses the
supposed "level terrain" of "objective truth" and renders such truths political, just or unjust, right
or wrong. In a word,
history transgresses all borders, in representation as well as identity.
In his short story "Borders" (1992),
King criticizes national--as opposed to cultural--citizenship. An account of
border crossings between Montana and Alberta, "Borders" speaks to the delimiting function of
nationalism as a
definitive declaration of "who" and "what" Natives are. In the post-NAFTA economy shared by
Canada and the
United States, "Blackfoot" doesn't signify or, put differently, what it does signify transgresses the
ideological and
political forces that police these epistemological lines. King's short story overlays the signs
"Native" and "Canadian"
and "American" to suggest, as does the grandmother in the short story, that the semiosis of Indian
identity is not
governed by border guards or the representational constraints such guards, in dominant discourse,
impose.
In Medicine River, the
world travels of tribal elder Lionel James offer tangible proofs (as well as contestations)
of such Anglo-European powers that try to domesticate Indian and Native identities and
signifying practices.5 We read
that James is part of a traveling exhibit that showcases "Indian-ness" to European audiences
willing to pay for
displays of Native authenticity. Recently returned to the reserve from a European trip, Lionel
James pays a visit to
Will's photoshop to ask for help in getting a credit card. It seems the hotels Lionel needs to stay
in Europe won't let
him in without one (170). Specifically, James laments the backdating of tribal identities to a
mythic past. He says, "I
got some real good stories, funny ones, about how things are now, but those people say, no, tell
us about the olden
days" (173).
This backdating of Indian and Native
culture bankrupts the vision of the present and pushes back from the
present the very re-emergence of history that can heal. Will, too, suffers from the internalization
of this backdating
process, and years away from the reserve have further isolated his sense of tribal identity. For his
part, Lionel James
embodies positive values of tribal myth, as opposed to extra-tribal mythologies photographic
realism might impose.
James' refusal to acknowledge Indian identity as domesticated, as reduced to commodity status in
a world system,
emboldens and hastens Will's own transformation and frees his own camerawork from colonialist
implications. After
securing Will's help in getting the credit card, James tells a funny story about Coyote and Raven
{57} debating the
need for a credit card in the modern world (172). Lionel then allows Will to photograph
him.
As an incomplete image in tribal
memory, Will's long-deceased father remains for much of the story curiously
unresolved. Using materials gleaned from his mother's old box, Will constructs a composite of
the rodeo man, a
pastiche consisting of old letters without return addresses, several photos, incomplete jokes and
recollections, and
indulgent fantasies. We do know Will's father is white, and that he left Rose and her sons to get
by alone in Calgary.
In the photographs, Will's father is typically concealed--an off-center figure in uniform "kneeling
behind" Will's
mother (5), or again "a hat . . . was pulled down over much of his face" (86). In one of the photos
that Will possesses
where his parents do appear together, his mother "look[s] back, not turned quite far enough to
see
the man behind her"
(10).
Early on, you discover that the project
of enhancing Will's father's image, of making his history visible to his
grown son, is intimately related to the book's larger project of asking questions about how
collective history is made
and remembered. Glancing at one of the photos, Will recalls: "I remember the picture of the two
of them. My mother
with her dark hair and dark eyes, the pleated skirt spread all around her . . . . His hand lay on her
shoulder lightly, the
fingers in sunlight, his eyes on shadows" (10). You can read, I think incorrectly, the play of light
here, of light onto
shadow, as the effect of pathos on the visual text. The unfamiliarity of the man, his whereabouts,
the alternative
histories he gave up when he chose to leave Rose and the boys behind: from this perspective,
such gaps in history
inform an allegory of larger historical forces affecting tribal communities, what in this case the
camera cannot see. In
King's text, this argument runs, the shadow obscures or "darkens" Will's father's whiteness as a
function of its
exclusion from a tribal world.
I argue, however, that Medicine
River writes against such an allegorical reading of race as shadow, in much the
same way as it contests ironic reversal as an adequate vehicle for contemporary Indian
representations. Such
allegories of tribal representation verge dangerously towards essentialist givens of what such a
"shadow" on
mixedblood identity might mean. Rather, recent work by Susan Bernardin suggests how the
emergence of shadow in
Mourning Dove's Cogewea marks competing and often conflicting discourses of
nation and miscegenation within
representations of mixedblood identity.6 Shadows indeed conceal, but they also
render other aspects of composition,
of representation, visible. In Will's case, it will be tribal stories (from Lionel James and others)
that, rather than {58}"unveil" his father's identity, provide added resolution to what
his search for his father has heretofore displaced: the
network of tribal relations invisible to the photograph that have held him strong.
Fittingly, it is Lionel James who,
unlike the camera, can share his humor and memories to speak of Will's father
intimately, in terms that neither romanticize nor damn the man's history in a grown son's eyes. Up
to this point, the
absent figure of Will's white father has exerted a strong undercurrent in the story, a pull towards
the tragic and bitter
fate of mixedblood identity King's text elsewhere resists. From Lionel, however, we learn that he
and Will's father
were friends before Will was born (168). Lionel recounts the time Will's father hid Will in a
laundry basket and tried
to convince Rose that the boy was in the washing machine (175). In a longer anecdote, Lionel
recalls:

"When I was in
Norway, I told the story about the time your father and mother went to one of those
chicken restaurants after a rodeo. Your mother was pregnant, and I guess the smell of all that fat
and grease
made her sick because she threw up."
"Threw up. At the restaurant?"
"That's right. She was sitting near the
window, and she couldn't get out. It was real messy."
"My mother did that?"
"So your father, quick as he can, said
in a real loud voice, 'Hey, what's in this chicken anyway?'" (172-3)

Through the prism of Lionel's
memory, Will's father takes on a dimension no photographic lens can reproduce.
Will's father has a sense of humor that Lionel can appreciate. Not the globe-trotting free-lance
photographer, pilot, or
college professor (84-5) of Will's fantasies, Will's father emerges here as a no less sympathetic
figure, a rodeo man
whose story has a meaningful basis in tribal memory. Lionel James, and the trickster humor he
brings to the text,
emerges at precisely the right moment to foreground Will's role not merely as photographic
witness to the tribal
history pictured around and outside of him, but in the context of his own personal history, his
sense of
identity-in-relation to the tribe.
Through Will's reeducation
concerning his mixedblood identity, King's text dispels the ontology of a
self-contained realism, of tribal histories as solely determined by a larger history of white
abandonment. Tribal
histories cannot be reducible to mere reflections of dominant culture. In these terms,
Medicine River avoids the
stylistic play of light that essentializes {59} tribal
history, recognizable in the black blankets used as backdrops in the
photos shot by Edward Curtis. With Lionel's help, Will avoids the chiaroscuro effect on
discourse, the visual
representation of pathos, the foredoomed visage of what Louis Owens calls the "Hollywooden
Indian."7 Ultimately,
the increased resolution of Will's father's image, his re-emergence in tribal discourse, doesn't
obscure or indemnify his
abandonment of Rose and the boys and the larger issue of Anglo-European abuse of tribal
histories. Rather, Will is
able to construct a broader relation with a father figure that, up to this point, had been informed
by sentimental
considerations of a bitter realism (abandonment) and tragic romance (the orphan's tale).
Finally, two photo shoots--one
missed, one achieved--vitiate MedicineRiver's critique of
photographic realism.
The shoot that doesn't happen occurs on the way back to Medicine River from a basketball
tournament in the States
when Harlen convinces Will to stop by the Custer National Monument at Little Big Horn to take
a photo for the folks
back home. Will, whose spirits are low, says aloud, "I wasn't that depressed" (110) and adds,
"The Blackfoot didn't
fight Custer" (107). In any case, Will and Harlen arrive too late for the gate, shut out by a young
white park ranger
who, despite a long night of travel and Will's exclamation that "Did you tell him we're Indians!"
(112), refuses to let
them in. Will fantasizes that he could "see that kid hiding in the dark, hunkered down behind the
fender of [his]
Bronco, his hands shaking around his rifle, waiting for us to come screaming and whooping and
crashing through the
gate" (112).
Will doesn't crash that gate; he doesn't
let fantasy realize what is, after all, a "dumb idea" (110). More
importantly, Will reads his exclusion from the Anglo-European narrative of "national" history in
increasingly more
positive terms as the epigraph to this essay suggests. Up to this point in the chapter, hints about
Will's possible
investment in a psychology of abandonment and mixedblood exclusion--cross-cut in the narrative
with an account of
an abysmal relationship with a white woman in Toronto--have kept his self-image frozen in a
nationalist imagination
only partially of his own heritage: white, Anglo-European, and exclusive. As his persistent
fantasies about his father
likewise attest, Will has distanced himself from the very tribal history that he needs. "Timed out"
from the hegemony
of Anglo-European nationalism, and primed to "time in" to the Indian critique of such a nation,
Will's jubilance at the
temporally-mixed metaphor of slam-dunking Custer speaks to the revisionary representational
practice Medicine
River subsequently implements.
Attending this revisionary process, the
photo shoot that does take {60}place starts out innocuously enough.
After some cajoling from Harlen, Will decides that he'll offer an affordable special on family
portraits. "So I ran a
special. Not for Harlen's reasons and not for Leon's . . . So for the last two weeks in June, you
could get a family
portrait for twenty dollars . . . . It was a great deal. Joyce Blue Horn was the first one to call"
(202-3). Suddenly, things
get complicated. Joyce Blue-Horn, Will realizes, has a broad construction of what "family" is.
"By twelve-thirty, there
were in the vicinity of fifty-four people--adults and kids--in my studio" (206-7). They adjourn to
the river, where Will
sets up his camera and, with some difficulty, prepares to take his first shot. Everybody clamors
for Will to be in the
photo, too (214). (Harlen, of course, knows how to coach him on the self-timer.) The visual
effect the narrative
achieves is remarkable. King writes:

The first shots were easy. I set the timer, ran across the sand and sat down
next to Floyd's granny. But with a
large group like that you can't take chances. Someone may have closed their eyes just as the
picture was taken.
Or one of the kids could have turned their back. Or someone might have gotten lost behind
someone else . . . .
Then, too, the group refused to stay in place . . . the kids wandered off among their parents and
relatives and
friends, and the adults floated back and forth, no one holding their positions. I had to keep
moving the camera
as the group swayed from one side to the other. Only the grandparents remained in place as the
ocean of
relations flowed around them. (215)

As a literary text resisting
(re)colonization in realist terms, MedicineRiver here achieves a
masterful
appropriation of what might otherwise appear as simply a visual text, a simple picture in
narrative. By dismissing the
realism, or prophetic verisimilitude, of what photos capture, King frees up their "content" to
better and different
purposes: the imagination and reinvention of social and cultural bonds and histories that can
reawaken the desire for
community and home. This liberation results in an image that cannot be captured, with a cultural
vitality that refuses
to sit still for the camera.
The indelibility of history that King's
text continuously reinscribes on each photographic image emerges here as
the plenitude of time, a time-in- being of tribal identity that verges, as close as any writing can,
on the cinematic.8 The
uncontainable image of tribal family points outside itself to explode the self-referentiality of the
realist image. In
terms of its larger {61} project, Medicine River
goes even further in making an argument about how a revisionary
practice of photographing tribal identities works. Photos, after all, just speak what they're told:
they don't necessarily
have to create the fiction, the illusion, of capturing a meaning that can stand by itself. Only a
photographer, on behalf
of his or her photo, can ever claim the ontological self-sufficiency of what photos merely
represent: "reality." And
even then, as the out-takes among Curtis' photos suggest, the photographer is often wrong and
needs to suppress
"inadvertent" representations that might contest his own. For his part, Will, informed by his own
sense of a renovated
personal history and that of the tribe around him, refuses any longer to stake such a
representational claim.9
To conclude, Will records the
photographic history of his town while investing his photos with a testimonial
function of tribal witness, of "time out" from hegemonic, Anglo-European culture in Native
(Blackfoot) country. His
photos remain something that the residents of Medicine River can hold on to, in
terms even more compelling than
Harlen Bigbear's failed career as a hoop dancer or Clyde Whiteman's effortless jumpshot on
break from serial jail
terms. Yet these photos cannot, in a strict sense, be considered artifacts. The AIM activist, David
Plume, carries what
Will considers an "unremarkable" image--torn, emulsion cracked and peeled, "beat up a lot"--the
only artifact he has
left to link him to Dennis Banks and his claim to have been present at Wounded Knee. "That's
me," David says.
"What do you think?" (190).
Will, on the other hand, revitalizes his
father's memory by displacing it from the shadowed referent on Kodak
paper, and recontextualizing his mixed-blood identity within tribal discourse, of which photos are
at best a compelling
inducement. With the avowal of photographs as sites of communal memory, Medicine
River discounts the denotative
function of tribal photos as an "authentic" Native culture in themselves, an extra-tribal
authenticity that, in turn,
validates extra-tribal determinations of the value of Native cultures.10
Moreover, Medicine River
deconstructs any realist basis for the distinction between words and pictures. The
text's critique explodes the realist frame around tribal referentiality to include the vast histories
and memories
photographic realism excludes. The pictures remain: not as metonymies of realism that sustain
the cultural "capture"
of Indian and Native identities but as metaphors of Indian difference, resistance, and humor
attending an uncapturable
semiosis. The text proffers word-images in form of pictorial representations that, ultimately,
collapse back into words
in a jubilant deferral of stabilized (racist) meanings.{62}
In tribal hands, photography emerges
as a culturally and historically productive process, rather than merely
reproducing or making copies of "authentic" tribal culture. This process, what Roland Barthes
has termed the camera
lucida, enables Will, a Native chronicler of tribal survival, to assert the Native
(in)difference to a Eurocentric notion
of History limited to the silence of alienated images. Of this capital-H History, Barthes writes:
"[It] is constituted only
if we consider it, only if we look at it--and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it"
(Barthes 65). A
Blackfoot wizard of silver nitrate and its processes, Will excises this version of History-- the
inheritance of Edward
Curtis--from the legacy of the present. Thomas King, for his part, merely lets the pictures of
Medicine River speak for
themselves, acknowledging that they must willfully slip out of any strictly realist frame, borne
upon a flowing "ocean
of relations" (215).

NOTES

Thomas King, Medicine River (Toronto: Viking Penguin, 1989), 110.
Subsequent references to the text appear by
page number in parentheses.

King uses this expression for the title of his edition of short fiction: All My
Relations: An Anthology of
Contemporary Canadian NativeFiction (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990).
In his introduction to the volume,
King writes: "'All my relations' is at first a reminder of who we are and of our relationship with
both our family
and our relatives . . . . [It] is an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have
within this universal
family by living our lives in a harmonious and moral manner (a common admonishment is to say
of someone that
they act as if they have no relations)" (ix).

The relation of literary realism to its historical contemporaries, romanticism and
naturalism, is important, and in
using the term I don't want to totalize realism in a way that can't address its mutations, its
persistence in discourses
of race and race difference over time. For an influential and controversial history of
nineteenth-century American
realism and naturalism see Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standardand
Logic of Naturalism: American
Literature at the Turn ofthe Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987).
For recent scholarship that investigates
the relation between the agency of Indian photographers and their "subject" see Lucy Lippard ed.
Partial Recall:{63}Photographs of Native North Americans
(New York: The New Press, 1992) and Timothy Troy,
"Anthropology and Photography: Approaching a Native American Perspective," Visual
Anthropology 5 (1992):
43-62. For work on Curtis see Christopher Lyman, The VanishingRace and
Other Illusions: Photographs of
Indians by Edward Curtis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).

Moving beyond the critique of photographic realism, Medicine River
presents a renovated model of agency within
the technologies of (self)representation for Natives, such as Will, who associate the liberation of
the Indian sign
with self-determination. Will uses the apparatus of flash, exposure, and silver nitrate to dislodge
photography's
association with photocolonialism. The vast £uvre of Edward Sheriff Curtis exemplifies the
association of
photographic technologies with the implementation of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier
Thesis" in Indian
country. Curtis was the in-house photographer of a nascent (yet powerful) culture industry,
whose notable
proponents included Curtis' sponsors J.P. Morgan and the Smithsonian Institution.

For an oral history that documents tribal travel within a global market for "Indian" identity,
as well as tribal
resistance to its commodification, see Harry Robinson, "An Okanagan Becomes Captive Circus
Showpiece in
England" in King's All My Relations; Robinson's tale, like the travels of Lionel
James in Medicine River, invokes
the liberating, postmodern trickster narrative mode theorized by Gerald Vizenor. See his
"Trickster Discourse:
Comic Holotropes and Language Games," in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on
Native AmericanIndian Literatures, Gerald Vizenor ed. (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989),
187-212.

Susan K. Bernardin, "Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning Dove's
Cogewea, The Half-Blood:
A Depiction of the GreatMontana Cattle Range," American
Literature 67.3 (September 1995): 487-510.
Bernardin writes: "A signifier of sexual danger in sentimental fiction as well as a term widely
associated with
blacks in the nineteenth century, the term 'shadow' . . .denotes the presence of the predatory white
[character]"
(489). Medicine River initially participates in the sexualized discourse of "shadow"
Bernardin pinpoints, only to
deallegorize the representation of Will's father in the present, to exculpate his memory in terms
more positive than
abandonment. In a persuasive overall analysis, Bernardin also situates Cogewea
within a sentimental discourse of
the orphan that "enables [Mourning Dove] to address the culturally taboo issue of miscegenation"
(496)
includ-{64}ing the illegal status under U.S. law of
mixed marriages between Anglo men and Indian women. In a
Canadian context--where after 1857 the official governmental policy of enfranchisement actively
promoted mixed
marriages to hasten assimilation--Medicine River illustrates how the abandonment
of a white father emerges in the
present to constrain representations of a tribal past.

As a cinematic stylistic, King's novel presents narrative "snapshots" that, once motivated
through the function of
plot, move cinematographically; different historical images are cross-cut in each chapter: POV
shot, reverse angle,
POV. This stylistic enhances--in tribal terms--the literary representation of "modernist"
photographic realism first
undertaken in the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos. The film, Medicine
River (Margolin 1992), starred Graham
Greene, Sheila Tousey, and Tom Jackson and won critical acclaim at the 1993 American Indian
Film Festival
(Taos). The film adaptation of King's text, based upon King's screenplay, was produced with
largely public funds--
through subsidies from the Canadian government--rather than from private sources.

Medicine River reestablishes an incontrovertible (Marxian) relation between
the technology of representation and
the consciousness of the man or woman who uses it; an idea that has been lost with the lucrative
representation of
"Indian" identity by primarily non-tribal capital in the culture industry. The persistent humility of
King's text in
using photographs to frame the world of Medicine River speaks to the reticence of
his text to abuse the power
afforded by tribal representations. Only certain deserving individuals, such as Lionel James,
appear able to invoke
history without importing the violences associated with that history.

Since the first European ships
landed in the "New World," the literature of Native Americans has been very
much concerned with the reclaiming of identity, identity that has been erased and/or altered
through wars, labels, and
published histories. And that reclamation inherently demands a negotiation between dominant
stereotypes imposed
upon Indian peoples and the self-definitions those peoples struggle to articulate within the
parameters of the dominant
culture. Gerald Vizenor has described contemporary Native American literature as caught up in
the vocalization of
survival and the resisting of domination: "The postindian warriors encounter their enemies with
the same courage in
literature as their ancestors once evinced on horses, and they create their stories with a new sense
of survivance. The
warriors bear the simulations of their time and counter the manifest manners of domination"
(Manifest Manners, 4).
In order to achieve this goal, authors have most often written with voices that reflect resentment
towards the dominant
culture while simultaneously resisting that culture. Perhaps more than any other group in history,
theirs is the
literature of resistment, a literature that is gradually scratching its way to the surface and carving
out a position within
the rocks of the traditional canon. As Kimberly Blaeser has put it, "Much of contemporary Indian
literature . . . writes
itself against the events of Indian/White contact and, perhaps more importantly, against the past
accounting of those
events" (37).
The Cherokee, Greek, German writer
Thomas King is a champion of resistment. He identifies with his Native
American heritage, and that heritage provides the inspiration for his fiction. As he said in an
interview with {67}
Constance Rooke, "I think of myself as being a part of that community [the Native community],
even though I'm
outside of it especially as I am writing the novel" (63). King identifies himself as part of an
"Indian" community, if
that generalization can be made, and he ultimately uses his prose to construct and reinforce the
values and identity of
that community. As Louis Owens explains in Other Destinies, the "recovering of or
rearticulation of an identity, a
process dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community, becomes in the face
of such obstacles
[colonial and post-colonial displacement] a truly enormous undertaking. This attempt is at the
center of American
Indian fiction" (5). In his two novels, Medicine River and Green Grass,
Running Water, King actively seeks, and
finds, a profoundly articulate voice for a Native community, in this particular case the Blackfoot
community, a voice
that demands recognition and, ultimately, respect. These two novels work in tandem to establish
an environment for
Native people that places them in direct opposition to the dominant culture's view of them.
King's most useful tool is the notion
of Trickster, and as in many traditional Native cultures, he uses Trickster
characters and strategies to force his audience into self-awareness and the non-Native reader into
an awareness of
another cultural experience. As he explains, the "trickster is an important figure for Native
writers for it allows us to
create a particular kind of world in which the Judeo-Christian concern with good and evil and
order and disorder is
replaced with the more Native concern for balance and harmony" (All xiii). His
novels require readers to consider and
reconsider both themselves and the "other." For readers locating themselves within the dominant
culture, the "other"
is the constructed idea of "Indian," an idea that is constantly being deconstructed and then
reconstructed in King's
fiction. Conversely, many Native readers will recognize the "other" as the dominant culture
which King, with his own
sense of Native identity, is at continual odds with. This is an act of resistment that serves
ultimately, and at times
aggressively, to reject the prescribed roles for "the Indian."
King's first novel, Medicine
River, is, as Percy Walton points out, a text that "tries to forge a presence for natives
in order to combat their status as Other" (78). The strength of the work lies in its deconstruction
of popular
stereotypes concerning Native people. This is the first step in King's process of articulating an
independent identity for
Native Americans. In order to posit a "new" identity, the old one must be destroyed, so the novel
"plays upon and
reverses the negative semiotic field of the indigene, with its connotations of drunkenness,
violence, dishonesty, and
mysticism, nature, nostalgia" (Walton 79).{68}
Although Walton's article, "'Tell Our
Own Stories': Politics and the Fiction of Thomas King," does a very good
job of explaining King's method of destroying stereotypes, she ultimately feels that:

The text avoids prioritizing native culture over other cultures. It therefore
also avoids positing a new centre, a
centre which would necessitate the construction of new margins. King's text rejects the culturally
exclusive
endeavor that has marginalized the native as Other, and privileges instead an inclusive and
collective process
that does not rest upon cultural superiority/inferiority. (79)

Although it may be nice, and less threatening, to view the text as an "inclusive and collective
process," the author, and
the reader for that matter, must necessarily view the idea of Native cultures in light of the "other."
Even if King is not
making a statement of cultural superiority by placing Native cultures in opposition to the
dominant "other," which I
believe he does to a certain extent, perhaps constructing the new margins Walton denies, he is
certainly and
unavoidably placing Native cultures in opposition to their representation as "other" by the
dominant culture. It would
be naive to think that "King breaks with the idea that in order to delineate culture, one must,
necessarily, cast another
as Other" (Walton 78). As the very title of Walton's article suggests, it is extremely difficult, and
perhaps even
impossible, to separate Native American fiction from politics. With any politically charged
discourse, there is inherent
opposition resulting in the construction of "otherness" and the dynamics of a
"superiority/inferiority" relationship.
One of the main events of
Medicine River is Will's return home. Having been raised away from the
reservation,
away from his extended family, away from his culture, it is obvious that Will, like Momaday's
Abel, has lost his way.
He returns to the reservation after his mother's death in order to reclaim, with the help of Harlen,
his sense of identity
within his cultural framework. As Harlen explains, "You see over there . . . Ninastiko . . . Chief
Mountain. That's how
we know where we are. When we can see the mountain, we know we're home. Didn't your
mother ever tell you that?"
(93). Apparently she had not, but Harlen steps into Will's life and educates him. But, Will says,
"Harlen Bigbear was
my friend, and being Harlen's friend was hard. I can tell you that" (11).Medicine River revolves
around this central catalyst, Harlen Bigbear, the Trickster, who forces Will, and others,
to (re)consider their situations and make decisions that lead to a reaffirmation of cultural identity.
He is:

{69}

like a spider on a web. Every so often, someone would come along and tear
off a piece of the web or poke a
hole in it, and Harlen would come scuttling along and throw out filament after filament until the
damage was
repaired. Bertha over at the Friendship Centre called it meddling. Harlen would have thought of
it as general
maintenance. (31)

King describes Harlen as making "sure that the world is in good health . . . . Darning the
community" (Rooke 67).
Like the Trickster of traditional stories, Harlen's job is to keep things ordered, focused, and
centered. And in this case
the center is both a physical location and a cultural framework, the two of which are inherently
linked. Perhaps more
importantly, this center is almost exclusively Blackfoot.
There is the profound sense that Will
comes home because it is better for him. To use the comparative "better" is
to immediately call to mind the obligatory "than," and in this case, the sentence would surely be,
"better than urban,
white, dominant, etc. culture"; it is better than the "other," at least for Will. By the end of the
book, Will has taken his
role within his community, illustrated through the metaphor of a group photograph. As Will sets
up the shot, Lionel
James, one of the tribal elders, says, "Best you be in the picture, too" (214). In a very humorous
scene, Will runs back
and forth from the self-timed camera to the chair Floyd's granny has provided for him. The
experience of the group
picture is described through Will's eyes:

Then, too, the group refused to stay in place. After every picture, the kids
wandered off among their parents and
relatives and friends, and the adults floated back and forth, no one holding their positions. I had
to keep moving
the camera as the group swayed from one side to the other. Only the grandparents remained in
place as the
ocean of relations flowed around them. (214)

Walton considers this photograph to suggest that "the margins become indistinguishable
from the centre and hence
obliterate a centre" (83). But clearly there is a center in the picture: the grandparents around
whom everyone else
revolves. The elders provide a cultural anchor to which Will, the lost "non-status" Indian, is at
last tied. Will's
adoption back into his culture is underscored when Harlen says, "Granny says you remind her of
him [her dead son].
She says maybe she should adopt you. That boy of hers always had a good story" (211). It seems
that Will, too, {70}has a good story, a story of coming home and claiming his lost
center, of rejoining his extended family.
King contrasts the world of the
"other" with Will's new-found center through a fitting comparison of
photographs. When Will was young, his mother had decided they needed a family portrait. The
picture consisted of
Will, his brother James, and their mother, and it remained tacked on the kitchen wall in Calgary
"until the paper began
to curl up and the colours started to fade" (204). Harlen has the opportunity to see this picture in
juxtaposition to the
group photo. Of it he says, "You and James look like someone sprayed you up and down with
starch" (215), pointing
out the artificial nature of Will's early, isolated, nuclear family. Unlike his new family portrait,
which is full of
supportive motion flowing around a firm cultural center, the earlier picture is static. Will takes
both pictures home
and puts them up on his kitchen wall. As he looks at the group picture, he realizes, "I was smiling
in that picture, and
you couldn't see the sweat" (216). The stale, sweaty picture taken in the city becomes a metaphor
for the dominant
culture, which Will must ultimately reject.
There is a similarity between the
photographs, however. Will explains that "Floyd's granny was sitting in her
lawn chair next to me looking right at the camera with the same flat expression that my mother
had, as though she
could see something farther on and out of sight" (216). This image is very similar to Gerald
Vizenor's description of
Ishi: "Ishi smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and looked past the camera over the borders of
covetous civilization, into
the distance" (128). All three of these Native people, whether they are living in a museum,
isolated in urban Calgary,
or at home on the reservation, refuse to be contained by the static definitions and stereotypes
imposed on them by the
dominant culture. They look beyond the frame provided for them, "into the distance," towards
"something farther on."
Perhaps that something is an existence of their own choosing, and in this case it seems to be an
existence based on
resistment, one which aggressively denies the prescriptions of dominant culture.
If Medicine River is the
first step in deconstructing stereotypes and rearticulating identity, then Green Grass,
Running Water is the second step with its reconstruction of narratives. King, juxtaposing
Christian with Native
American narratives throughout the novel, certainly demands increased effort from his readers,
particularly from those
outside Native cultures. He takes characters and events from Native American creation myths as
well as from the
history of the colonization of North America and blends them with Western expansion and
creation myths, thus
forcing the reader to consider the message contained within the world he creates. {71} Although King's method seems
to be, at times, both a bit too easy and a little too "punny," he succeeds in constructing an
alternate narrative that
relocates power within Native American cultures and grants respect to the people of those
cultures. This move is
central to King's work, as it is to much contemporary Indian fiction. As Blaeser explains,
"Because historical stories,
imaginative stories, cultural stories work to form our identity, the disarming of history through
satiric humor liberates
and empowers us in the imagination of our destinies" (49). It is also important to note that this
syncretic act of
blending differing cultural beliefs and myths is not a simple acceptance of their combination
historically, but rather a
subverting of the dominant matrix as a way to deconstruct and reject it.
In this second novel, King relocates
Christian narratives as stemming from a crazy dream of Coyote. As the
novel opens, "That Coyote was asleep and that Coyote was dreaming. When that Coyote dreams,
anything can
happen. . . . So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs
around. Makes a lot
of noise" (1). The dream is full of self-importance and believes that it is Coyote at first, but
Coyote tells the dream
that it can be a dog. Being a dog is not good enough for this dream, and "when that Coyote
dream
thinks about being a
dog, it gets everything mixed up. It gets everything backward . . . . I am god, says that Dog
Dream" (2). As the novel
progresses, the notion of the Christian God as a backwards idea becomes clearer; for many
people, indeed,
Christianity's god is no more than dog spelled backwards and is, in philosophy and function,
merely doggerel. Since
Coyote is a trickster figure for many Native cultures, his creation of the Christian God privileges
Native American
over Western deities. The power differential is recaptured. This idea is reminiscent of Betonie's
words in Leslie
Silko's Ceremony: "We can deal with white people, with their machines and their
beliefs. We can because we
invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place"
(132).
As illustrated above, King quickly,
within the first three pages of the novel, subverts the Christian view of god.
His next step is to set up an environment and characters whose actions further the devaluation of
Christian doctrine
specifically and Western philosophy in general. The prison at Fort Marion in Florida becomes
King's symbol for the
ill-treatment of Native Americans during the colonization of this continent. This prison housed
mostly Plains people,
and aside from being a simple cage, it was also a torture chamber. The prisoners had to deal with
poor living
conditions, an unfamiliar and unfriendly climate, and extreme loneliness due to their separation
from family. In effect,
Fort Marion symbolizes the {72}hell Native Americans went through at the hands of the
invading colonizers. King
locates the Christian heaven within this hell of a prison, and, in actuality, the "heaven" colonists
found upon arrival in
the "new" world became a "hell" for the people who had always lived here.
King transplants this heaven of Fort
Marion to a mental hospital filled with recognizable administrators. In
charge of the facility is Dr. Joseph Hovaugh. His secretary's name is Mary, and his trusted
colleague is Dr. John Eliot.
For them, the place is paradise, but interestingly, the hospital can't seem to sustain itself unless
the four old Indians
are contained within it.

The trouble had started in the spring, seven years before. There had been a
blight and all the elm trees in the
garden had died. Even the huge oak that stood at the center of the grounds had been affected.
Several large
branches had turned gray, and though the tree was still alive, the leaves were sparse and dull . . .
[and] the death
of the old trees, which were almost as old as the garden itself, left Dr. Hovaugh burdened with
inexplicable
remorse and guilt. (77-8)

This time of death and decay, apparently occurring in a seven year cycle, coincides with the
escapes of the old
Indians. The Western, Christian idea of "the garden," which on this continent is irrevocably
bound up in guilt-free
colonization, is only able to exist when Native American identity is locked up inside it. That is to
say that the
dominant culture can feel good about itself and what it has done when Native American cultures
are either absorbed
or contained.
Also, King is speaking to, through this
same image of the living/ dying garden, the fact that the colonial culture
lives a parasitic life, drawing sustenance from the lands and cultures of the people indigenous to
this continent. This
point is linked to differing narratives. Dr. Hovaugh tells Sergeant Cereno,

I suppose I should begin by saying that in the beginning all this was land.
Empty land. My great-grandfather
came out here from the Old World. He was what you might call an evangelist . . . . He bought
this land from the
Indians . . . . He bought the land from a local tribe. They're extinct now I believe . . . . I believe
they were all
killed by some disease. (102)

Dr. Hovaugh has constructed a
specific historical narrative, which {73} suits his
position in reality. He, like
many members of the dominant culture, finds it easy to think of the land as being empty when his
forefathers landed,
and it is perhaps tragic, but not self-implicating, to think of the Indians who lived here as dying
of some disease.
The four old Indians are key to the
structure of the novel. King divides Green Grass, Running Water into four
sections, each centered around one of the old Indians. The subsections of the novel that deal
specifically with the old
Indians are told through a conversation between Coyote and an I, a sort of universal
narrator whose job is to explain
why the world is broken. It becomes clear that the old Indians escape from the hospital because
they are "trying to fix
up the world" (133).
The first section of the novel is
presented "according to the Lone Ranger" (8) who is one of the old Indians. He
begins the story, a story which ultimately is the very text of the novel it is contained within. The
Lone Ranger
attempts several beginnings of the story, which are all rejected by the other old Indians.
Apparently there is a correct
beginning for this story, a beginning that is both traditional and divorced from Western
culture as well as from the
stereotypical Hollywood rhetoric attached to the image of Native Americans. When the Lone
Ranger makes an
attempt at the beginning--"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,"--he is told
flatly, "That's the
wrong story . . . . That story comes later" (11). Once again, King reinforces the fact that the
Christian narrative is
secondary to traditional Native American narratives. The Lone Ranger says, "Everybody makes
mistakes," but the
reply comes, "Best not to make them with stories" (11).
The narrative I explains
that First Woman "walks around that world [Sky World] with her head in the trees,
looking off in the distances, looking for things that are bent and need fixing. So that one walks
off the edge of the
world. So that one starts falling" (38-39). First Woman falls out of her world, her narrative, and
lands in another
world, Water World, but this world is confused by the presence of GOD, the backwards dog
dream of Coyote. At first
everything seems fine; First Woman comes across grandmother Turtle, and they proceed to
develop land. But then
GOD decides that a garden is needed, and First Woman lives in the Garden with Ahdamn.
Eventually GOD enters the garden and
comes into direct conflict with First Woman. GOD tells her, "just so we
keep things straight . . . this is my world and this is my garden. . . . There are rules, you know . . .
. Christian rules"
(72-73). First Woman does not agree with these Christian rules or with GOD's "grouchy"
demeanor, so she and
Ahdamn decide to leave the garden; they attempt to walk out of the narrative that has been
constructed {74}for them
but find themselves moving west, a reflection of the narrative of manifest destiny. They come
upon a "bunch of dead
rangers," (74) and are accused of the murders because "it looks like the work of Indians" (75).
Ironically, First Woman
is able to disguise her identity as Indian by masking herself. When she puts on the black mask,
she is recognized as
the Lone Ranger, but when she removes it, she is arrested and sent to Fort Marion. In this world,
Native Americans
are allowed freedom only when existing behind the mask of the Western narrative. However, the
ability to speak from
within the discourse of the dominant culture is also an asset.
The other three old Indians all arrive
at the hospital run by Dr. Hovaugh in similar ways. Changing Woman,
Thought Woman, and Old Woman all fall out of Sky World and into Water World, and each
finds herself forced into
a role within the dominant narrative. For the old Indians, the stories they find themselves in are
not their own; they,
due to Coyote's dream, are caught up in narratives in which they do not belong. These Christian
based, Western
narratives, in accordance with an all too familiar tradition, want these Native American
characters to assume familiar
roles, preconceived roles demanding that Indians be stoic, inferior, and powerless on the tragic
path to disappearance.
However, just as King's novel itself attempts to, the old Indians reject these stagnant parts and
carve out new
narratives for themselves by appropriating the dominant roles within dominant narratives.
If, as Coyote says, "that silly dream
has everything mixed up," (72) and the world is suffering because of it, the
old Indians do their best to correct the problem. Their mission is best illustrated through their
quest to change the
outcome of Hollywood Westerns: the popular narratives of the colonial culture. In these films,
Native Americans are
represented as the "other," who must be destroyed in order to preserve the dominant way of life.
As Latisha points out,
"if the Indians won, it probably wouldn't be a Western" (216). In the novel, the Western they
attempt to "fix" is "TheMysterious Warrior. The best Western of them all, with John Wayne, Richard
Widmark, Maureen O'Hara" (211). The
plot of this movie is the typical narrative for all Westerns: "every one was the same as the others.
Predictable.
Cowboys looked like cowboys. Indians looked like Indians" (353). John Wayne and Richard
Widmark are pinned
down by a group of Indians, but just as the Indians move in for the kill, the cavalry comes to their
rescue. The old
Indians, however, appropriate and reconstruct this old, black and white narrative:

Everywhere was color . . . . Portland turned and looked at Wayne and
Widmark, who had stopped shouting and
waving their hats and were {75} standing around
looking confused and dumb. Without a word, he started his
horse forward through the water, and behind him his men rose out of the river, a great swirl of
motion and
colors--red, white, black, blue . . . . And then Portland and the rest of the Indians began to shoot
back, and
soldiers began falling over . . . . John Wayne looked down and stared stupidly at the arrow in his
thigh, shaking
his head in amazement and disbelief as two bullets ripped through his chest and out the back of
his jacket.
(357-358)

The old Indians give the clichéd Indians of the Western the ability to resist the
narrative constructed for them and
fight back, just as King's novels fight back.
The old Indians also walk into the
lives of the non-mythic characters in the novel and affect their world,
particularly the world of Lionel Red Dog. Lionel is at a transitional stage in his life, and he is not
sure exactly what
route his life should take. After Bill Bursom sets up his store display, a map of Canada and the
United States
constructed out of television sets, he thinks, "Lionel might just appreciate it. And then again, he
might not" (140). The
map represents "a concept that lay at the heart of business and Western civilization," (330) and it
is not clear whether
Lionel will identify with, and ultimately follow, this Western concept, or not. Norma recognizes
her nephew's
dilemma and encourages him to follow a traditional path: "Lionel, if you weren't my sister's boy,
and if I didn't see
you born with my own eyes, I would sometimes think you were white" (7), and it is she who
suggests that the old
Indians help Lionel as part of their project. For his birthday, the old Indians give Lionel a leather
jacket with fringe. It
is the same jacket John Wayne wore in the movie, but now the jacket has "a couple of holes . . .
in the back," (336)
symbolizing the resistment and reversal of the traditional Hollywood narrative in which the
Indians are killed and the
colonizing whites are victorious. This jacket gives Lionel the strength to reject the dominant
"other" and defend the
traditions and culture of the Blackfeet.
King's empowerment of Lionel
specifically, and the Blackfoot community in general, is perhaps most
recognizable in Lionel and Eli's victory over George. Earlier in the novel, Eli recalls a childhood
memory of a "man
[who] climbed on top of [his] car and began taking pictures" (151) of the Sun Dance and when
noticed, "slid off the
car, climbed into the driver's seat, rolled up all the windows, and locked the doors" (152). Eli's
uncle, Orville,
confronts the man at his car, explaining, "You can't take pictures of the Sun Dance" (153).
Eventually, the man gives
Orville the film, but when it is developed, "the film [is] blank" (157); the man has switched the
film {76}and is thus
successful, not unlike the dominant culture in general, in stealing part of a Native American
culture.
By the end of the novel, however,
Lionel and Eli are able to protect their beliefs. George comes to the Sun Dance
and begins to take pictures secretly, but he is discovered and confronted by Lionel. He forces
George to open up his
case, revealing a hidden camera, but George simply says, "No harm in a couple of pictures"
(425). Mirroring the
words of his own uncle, Eli tells George, "You can't take pictures of the Sun Dance" (425).
George also attempts to
trick them by giving them a blank canister of film, but Eli searches the case:

George looked past Lionel. Eli was bent over the case . . . . Eli released the
camera from its mount, opened the
back, and took out a roll of film . . . . Eli got to his feet and turned to face George. He held the
film canister in
his hand . . . and he caught the end of the film between his thumb and forefinger and stripped it
out of the
canister in a great curling arc. (426)

In this case, the dominant culture is not allowed to selectively capture and appropriate part of
a Native culture; the
story has worked out differently. George, unable to carry out his plan, shouts, "It's the twentieth
century. Nobody cares
about your little powwow. A bunch of old people and drunks sitting around in tents in the middle
of nowhere" (427).
Lionel replies simply, "There's nothing for you here" (427).
Apparently there is something here for
Lionel. Even though at first "it was awkward sitting cross-legged on the
blanket, trying to keep from spilling stew on his pants," (404) Lionel, like Will in
Medicine River, comes to recognize
the strength and stability of his culture: "The circle was tightly formed now, the older people
sitting in lawn chairs
along the front edge, the younger people standing in the back, the children constantly in motion"
(429). Both of these
characters find themselves within a setting that is comfortable, and in many ways healing, to
them, a setting which is
almost exclusively Native American and anchored by traditions symbolized by the elders. Before
the old Indians leave
the Sun Dance, Hawkeye advises Lionel: "Try not to mess up your life again . . . . We're not as
young as we used to
be" (428).
As a final symbolic gesture of their
repairs to the world, the old Indians, with the help of Coyote, cause the dam
to break. This dam, built on Native land, has stopped the flow of the river and created Parliament
Lake and is, in
effect, a symbol of the power of the dominant culture to alter {77} narratives at will. Bill Bursom reflects this
sentiment: "As long as the grass is green and the waters run. It was a nice phrase, all right. But it
didn't mean
anything. It was a metaphor. Eli knew that. Every Indian on the reserve knew that. Treaties were
hardly sacred
documents" (296). Even if Western culture has the power to stop the water from running, King
announces that Native
American cultures have the power to release the water. Even though the symbolism is too
obvious, King places three
cars on the lake, a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Karmann-Ghia, representing Columbus' fleet. Coyote
sings a song, causing
the dam to burst: "And the dam gave way, and the water and the cars tumbled over the edge of
the world. . . . Below,
in the valley, the water rolled on as it had for eternity" (454-455). The releasing of the waters
reverses the Western
narratives of discovery and colonization.
In his introduction to The
Native in Literature, Thomas King writes, "These terms, 'Indian' and 'Native,' are
historical and literary terms much like 'continent' and 'narrative,' which seem to suggest specific,
known quantities but
which hint at vast geographies and varied voices" (9). King's own literature attempts to provide
these "varied voices,"
and in doing so, "places the Eurocentric reader on the outside, as 'other,' while the Indian reader
(a comparatively
small audience) is granted, for the first time, a privileged position" (Owens, Destinies
14). Writing the literature of
resistment, King, like many Native American novelists, refuses to take part in the narratives of
the dominant culture.
As Owens adeptly explains, American Indians "are in their fiction rejecting the American gothic
with its haunted,
guilt-burdened wilderness and doomed Native and emphatically making the Indian the hero of
other destinies, other
plots" (Destinies 18).
In Medicine River, King
illustrates the fact that Native Americans, like Will's mother and Floyd's granny, must
look beyond the frame that has been provided for them in order to combat a stereotypical,
stagnant existence. Green
Grass, Running Water effectively erases the frame itself and empowers Native people to
construct their own
narratives and defy the "rules" of dominant Euroamerican culture. As Owens tells us,

Native American writers are insisting that rather than "use" Native
American literature, the world must enter
into dialogue with that literature and make it profoundly a part of our modern existence, just as
Native
Americans have for centuries made European literature a part of Native America. And they are
insisting that
rather than looking to this literature for reflections of what they expect to see--their own {78}constructed
Indianness--readers must look past their mirroring consciousness to the other side.
(Mixedblood 23-24)

These novels taken together make
a bold statement about the reclaiming of voice, in this case a voice that has
been systematically marginalized. As the narrator of Green Grass, Running Water
points out, "There are no truths . . .
. Only stories," (432) and through the voice of Thomas King and others like him, Native
Americans are putting forth
theirown stories, stories of resistment which acknowledge the
inherently syncretic nature of the world while
simultaneously fighting cliches and stereotypes. Readers need only to listen and to take
notice.

A few years ago my husband and I
became involved in a dispute with a neighbor over some half-dozen
old-growth oak trees that lined a common driveway to our house in the southern California
mountains. Although the
driveway was and had been perfectly usable, our neighbor wanted to cut the trees in order to
widen the passage. We
tried to find a legal way to prevent the destruction of the trees, and in a consultation with our
lawyer I asked if there
were not something inherent to the wholeness and viability of the mountain slope--the age and
value of the trees as
habitat and food source, the watershed of the slope, the distribution of sun and shade on that side
of the
mountain--that would weigh against the neighbor's rights on the deed. Did land have no rights at
all? I learned that it
did not; moreover, in the deposition that eventually took place, the trees were consistently labeled
as impediments and
the driveway, over my objections, defined as an improvement. The experience was a revelation:
there was locked into
our legal concepts, our very language, a manner of seeing so inimical to what seemed to me both
profound and prima
facie common sense that I could not believe so many people credited it. It would take a
monumental and fundamental
rethinking of mental (as well as mountain) premises to change such a strange and hostile way of
thinking and looking
at the world.
These two books undertake, it seems
to me, the beginnings of just such a tectonic shift in deeply ingrained ways
of thinking, particularly thinking about literature, but with ramifications for that wider kind of
looking as well. Both
books ask the reader to begin rethinking not only the {81} texts under discussion, but all texts, and even the nature of
text and textuality. They represent a departure from much of the criticism to date on American
Indian literatures,
which has generally sought to validate the literature by showing how well it can be illuminated
by this or that theory
or analytic method; here instead, Dunsmore and Kroeber ask us to take the literature itself and
see how it can help us
interrogate our theories and re-view our values.Earth's Mind, although I
have just described it as a radical departure, is also a very old-fashioned book in
resurrecting an unfortunately much-neglected critical form: the personal essay. Dunsmore's
pieces (not all are
essays--some are poems, one is a kind of closet drama or as he calls it, a ritual that is "an exercise
in ethno-poetics")
are the fruit of years of thought, meditation, conversation and classroom exercises. Long a
professor in Montana,
where his teaching integrates writing and first-hand environmental awareness, Dunsmore
incorporates what he has
learned from Indian students, friends and colleagues in his ruminations on the connections
between literature,
personal history and the natural world.
The introduction and title essay
present the substructure of Dunsmore's theory: it seeks to explore the connection
between the word and the world via an etymology linking human/humus/humble and reaching
out to embrace John
Swanton, Chief Joseph, Chiricahua traditions, Wallace Stevens, and a Crow student. Subsequent
essays on Silko's
Ceremony, McNickle's Wind from an Enemy Sky, and Laurens van
der Post's The Heart of the Hunter continue the
theme, always mindful of an underlying, unspoken question: Aside from making a career of it,
what is literature for,
anyway? The essay on Nicholas Black Elk, especially, should become essential reading.
There are risks in this kind of writing:
the occasional slip into pomposity or posturing, the experiment that does
not completely succeed. The book does not successfully avoid all pitfalls, but the glitches are
modest and far, far
outweighed by the quiet, respectful, continually enriching insights.

Karl Kroeber's Artistry in
Native American Myths takes a different road to look at some of the same questions,
notably the basic one of what we are trying to do when we read literature at all. There is a
passage in Leslie Silko's
short story "Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hands" that speaks to the problem. The story's
protagonist--a Laguna
bachelor with a fondness for the bottle and an eye for the ladies--overhears a couple of women
speaking in Spanish;
what he hears is the phrase (rendered in the {82}English text as) "as big as a horse," and from it he concocts an
elaborate and highly detailed set of assumptions about the sexuality of Mexican women. The
vignette offers a
cautionary paradigm for the critic who would approach transcribed translations of traditional
American Indian oral
texts. Most of us are even further removed than Silko's protagonist from anything like a reliable
sense of indigenous
texts: we encounter fragments of verbal artifacts torn from their cultural and textual contexts,
rendered into unfamiliar
vocabularies, petrified in the alien medium of print, and in general estranged from almost every
conceivable
connection that could render them meaningful.
Up to this point, the major--indeed,
arguably the only--creditable criticism of this literature has been tentative
and careful attempts to reconstruct in some conceptual way whatever can be ascertained of the
composition,
performance and linguistic contexts that would make sense of it: the work of Larry Evers and
Felipe Molina, Dell
Hymes, William Bright, and Dennis Tedlock. Karl Kroeber has contributed to this scholarship
the special perspective
of comparative literature, and his article theorizing translation of American Indian texts as a
model for comparative
literature studies deserves much wider recognition. In Artistry in Native AmericanMyths Kroeber pulls together many
of the threads that have been introduced in previous uncollected writings and offers a sustained
study of oral texts in translation.Artistry in Native American
Myths is a personal book, especially in Kroeber's unique ability to draw on the riches
of his father's work. In its format the book looks like something many of us have expressed a
longing for: the
"casebook" anthology incorporating related primary texts with critical and background
commentary. Each of the five
sections opens with primary text (in sections two through five there are several related texts)
followed by
commentary. The sections focus on "Anthropological Roots of Ethnopoetics," "Mythic
Imagining," "Human Cultures,
Animal Cultures," "Trickster-Transformer's Orality," and "Myth as Historical Process." The
reader has the rare chance
to look at thematically related stories (e.g., the Bear Woman story, Yurok stories about the
origins of blood-money
payment, the Stone Boy story, and of course Trickster tales) followed by commentaries that pull
together
anthropological, literary and personal observations.
Throughout his exegesis Kroeber
stresses the importance of moving away from "justifying" texts by applying
theory and moving towards using local knowledge (insofar as it is available or reconstructable),
the necessity of
considering the uniqueness of the individual performance {83} productions of any text, of seeing at all points the
relationship between what Toby Langen, in an important essay introducing some of the core
ideas that Kroeber draws
on, has called the "version" and the "collection." While arguing for an alternative to the
universalizing tendencies of
anthropology and folklore, Kroeber makes use of theoretical and critical abstractions to
rationalize the literature so far
as possible from a non-western perspective. The main difficulty the discussion faces throughout
is the elusiveness and
ephemerality of oral performance: pinning down in print the distinctive features of evanescent
oral telling is a
paradoxical and eventually frustrating endeavor, but not less necessary or valuable. The
reflections on trickster stories
illustrate the point, for regardless of the importance of seeing the distinctive particulars of any
given story, the
argument inevitably ends up referring to the disembodied archetype. Such
contradictions--particularly apt in the case
of discussion of Trickster-- invigorate the discussion, drawing attention to the way in which it
opens up new territory.
The most important contribution of
these two books is that of opening up new territory. Rich meditations in
themselves, they only hint at how important and rewarding their approaches should come to be as
more of us attempt
to make these tectonic shifts in vision and perspective--shifts that can ready us for whole new
ways of seeing, new
ways of using language.

When I first met Larry Evers, I
was even more ignorant than I am today. Dropped by chance into Tucson, I
connived an appointment with Evers, the English department head at the University of Arizona,
and swallowed up
about an hour of his time to talk about how masterfully I was running our writing center at the
University of Georgia,
how brilliantly I had set up our computer systems, and how much I had learned about what I
probably called
Amerindian literature in the past few years. I closed out my time by asking him if he knew of any
experts in Yaqui
stories that could be of help in my reading of Alfredo Vea's La Maravilla. Well,
even if you've only done a subject
search on Yaqui songs, you'd know better. And if you'd read the introduction of Yaqui
Deer Songs: Maso Bwikam (by
Evers and Molina), with its arresting discussion by both authors about working together, you
would know that Evers'
mention of a couple of the more obvious names, as well as a recent Arizona graduate who liked
Vea's work, and of his
friend Felipe Molina, without mentioning his own name, was the act of a man who knew I was a
fool but was too
polite to point the fact out directly.
By the time I met Louis Owens, I had
made considerable strides in figuring out what I did not know. I asked him
about that big cattle hound that appears with him on the back flyleaf of Other
Destinies, and I told him about the
17-year-old collie mix that I talked to whenever I needed advice from my dead father, and I
worried out loud about
our little spare dog with a liver problem. Somehow, the contrast in the meetings has stuck with
me for a while, and I
now believe they echo what I think is a growth in literary {85} talk/criticism aimed at Indian literatures. That is, when
I hear or read a literary critic, I always hope I'll hear an answer to a very old set of questions: who
are you? who are
your people?
Like most scholars old enough to
worry about their cholesterol, I was taught to believe that good criticism spoke
with the anonymous voice of a master rationalist, a sort of also-ran scientist, who dissected
literary works like dead
cats fresh out of the formaldehyde. I have since not only learned more ways to skin a cat, but to
develop enough
respect for cats to leave them fuzzy and contrary. I like them living in disdain of me (like stories)
far more than
splayed out on a lab table (like texts). And no matter how sharp a critic may hone in on a
work/writer/movement, I
now believe he's always telling me a personal story, not a universal narrative aimed at decoding a
text.
All of the above informs my view of
two new books by Louis Owens and Paula Gunn Allen, both of which
thrust forward an answer to those ancient conversational openings--who are you, and who are
your people--which past
readers have asked of Owens and Gunn Allen with widely ranging levels of politeness. Neither
book is purely
genealogy, but both return at many points in their telling to build literal and emotional family
trees, and for both
books, "genealogy" builds the foundations and boundaries for their most central theses. The
mountain neighbors that I
think of from my childhood spoke in much the same way: while each would gladly share an
opinion on the TVA,
federal tax laws governing distilleries, and other topics from "those lying Atlanta newspapers,"
they would also
preface every global comment with "Course all I know runs from the hills in front of me to the
hills in back of me."
At first glance, Louis Owens seems to
be on an academic quest in Mixedblood Messages; in fact, many of the
pieces in the book have appeared as journal articles or are echoed closely by his Other
Destinies:Understanding the
American Indian Novel. However, the running struggle of the book is a heightened
wrestle with authenticity--in
literature, film, television, and Owens himself. Owens' Other Destinies, a standard
in college Native literature
courses, makes one accurate but not always popular observation--that most American Indian
literature now read as
such is by authors of mixed blood, typically authors more often tenured than not. This statement
draws fire from some
Indian authors, such as Sherman Alexie and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who have in various media
derided most of the
rather small pool of academically-adopted Indians as self-invented. Hence, one finds Owens
authenticating himself in
what at first might seem to be a self-justifying genealogy but is instead a complex of essays that
{86}one might more
properly term an anatomy of Louis Owens.
As with Off the
Reservation, we find an apparent linear structure (with literature, film, autobiographical
sections,
followed by an almost anagogic section called "Words, Wilderness, and Native America"). But
while Gunn Allen will
explicitly come home, in every sense of the word including a return to Laguna Pueblo, Owens
records a dislocation of
memory as the "blood trails" of his grandmothers and great aunts, centered around wonderful but
generations-old
stories of Oklahoma and Mississippi, which give way to the west coast lands upon which his own
childhood
memories map meaning. While the final essay, "'Everywhere There Was Life': How Native
Americans Can Save the
World," tackles a feeble opponent (the revisionist theory that Indian over-hunting wiped out the
mega-fauna of eons
past, probably the result of some ghost of Thomas Jefferson still trying to prove his silly
Mastodon theory), it offers
one of the more coherent suggestions of what "pan-Indian" sensibilities might be. Nonetheless, I
find what Louis
Owens has to say about himself to be much more compelling, for the same reason
that Off the Reservation resurrects
my interest in the person Paula Gunn Allen. Owens' autobiographical passages ring true:
"Missing from the photo are
the family's father and grandfather, just as fathers and grandfathers seem to be missing in almost
all photos on the
mixedblood Indian sides of both my mother's and father's families" (137). In fact, Owens takes
great pains to delineate
the bewildering situation of Southeastern tribes' descendants:

Many Indian people have been strong enough or fortunate enough to cling to
family, community, clan, and tribe
through this half millenium of deliberate, orchestrated, colonially and federally designed physical
and cultural
genocide. But a great many have not. Those mixed white-and-Indian families, or
white-Indian-and African
American, with children sometimes resembling a Rainbow Coalition, assembled for somber
photos in front of
blanket-covered cabins, represent a crucial period in the histories of America and of mixed-blood
peoples in this
country, a period that is often either unknown or misunderstood by Americans, Indian and
non-Indian alike.
Cherokees frequently bear the brunt of jokes throughout Indian Country because too many are
blond and too
many who identify as Cherokee have only the faintest and most cliched ideas of Cherokee
princess
great-grandmothers. However, the Southeastern tribes did, in fact, have early and intense contact
with
Europeans, and a great many did, in fact, marry or cohabit with Europeans--especially Irishmen,
Welshmen,
Scotsmen, and Frenchmen (147).

Underlying all of
Mixedblood Messages is Owens' career-long move {87} to re-appropriate the term frontier for
those who really inhabit it--mixedbloods and other cross-cultural inhabitants--but the book most
literally marks out
boundaries of identity or "authenticity" as Owens unfolds his personal genealogy of body
(complete with pictures of
Choctaw and Cherokee relations) and of mind.

Off the Reservation,
Gunn Allen explains, copies "an expression current in military and political circles" that
designates "someone who doesn't conform . . . anomalies: mavericks, renegades, queers" (6). Her
original choice of
title for the book was "Pocahontas Perplexed: An Indian Woman's View of Life, Literature and
Philosophy," as
opposed to the publisher's choice of "A Native American's View"; however, a SAIL
interview (Fall 1997; 9.3:14)
offers a personalized summary of many of the book's features, particularly Gunn Allen's
insistence that "I'm saying
these things. I know what I think; that's my responsibility. I'm not supposed to know what other
people think."
The collections of essays fall into
three sections, Haggles/ gynosophies, Wyrds/orthographies, and La
Frontera/na[rra]tivities, which move from the theoretical, to the relational, to the personal, but
every essay "has a
narrative line, a plot if you will "(10) that never strays far from Gunn Allen's childhood and the
woman-centered
stories that informed that childhood, such as the two women who are abducted by Bear Man or
Snake Man, tested by
the mothers of those two, with each "then sent back to her people to give them the Chantway she
has earned the right
to sing and bestow" (55). Many of the not-always-well-received ideas that permeate Sacred
Hoop and other Gunn
Allen writings resurface here, yet they are placed more squarely in what I will call a genealogical
context, and even
the most political statements that mark out territory for lesbians and academic multiculturalists
boil down to one:
"You can't be right, self-righteous, and truthful at the same time" (64). And who can deny for any
community the hope
that "the community itself will in all matters make all decisions pertaining to itself, its lands, and
its progeny" (74).
Other observations may be fond recollection: "Among other things, the Laguna example
demonstrates that violence of
any kind is not a male trait dictated by either hormones or natural law" (80), but even if this is a
revisionist myth, one
cannot but wish it to be so. A few stances seem surely aimed to both strike truth and incite
knee-jerk denial: "It is
instructive to note that in every region where Aryan patriarchal elitist systems have held sway,
human populations
have risen far beyond the ability of the environment to sustain them" (88).{88}
Much of Gunn Allen's criticism of
white American patriarchy seems mere bear-baiting (though she would no
doubt suggest that I'm slandering bears), but one thread that I find particularly convincing
surfaces most fully in the
essay title "'Indians,' Solipsisms, and Archetypal Holocausts." In essence, Gunn Allen describes a
distinction between
the solo/solipsistic nature of much of Western literary criticism, and the relational nature of
criticism she would hope
for, as essentially cultural: "In the world of the patriarchs everything is about politics; for much
of the rest of the
world, politics occupies little or any part of our preoccupations. Native Americans are entirely
concerned with
relations to and among the physical and nonphysical and various planetary energy-intelligences
of numerous sorts"
(172). I would tend to simplify this distinction into one between those who think they're smarter
than the world they
live in, and those who don't, as I think Gunn Allen would have us apply this distinction far
beyond the lit-crit world.
Somewhere in the world I hope a grad student will begin re-reading her alongside Silko and
Terry Tempest Williams'
Refuge, and not just because of the confluence of those three writers' meditations
on the yellow dust of uranium mines.
Literary criticism is nonetheless Gunn
Allen's frequent subject, perhaps an indication that small world though
lit-crit is, it is largely in need of fixing: "In the narcissistic enterprise of contemporary criticism,
we have lost sight of
the purpose of criticism. . . . Confusing the menu with the meal is an occupational hazard for
intellectuals, and
maintaining colonial boundaries through the agency of intellectual domination is not an
appropriate endeavor for
professionals who would bear the title of Humanist meaningfully" (153). And just as Thomas
King so effectively
deconstructs the term "post-colonial" ("Godzilla versus Post-Colonialism," Western
WorldLiterature Written in
English, 30.2 [1990] 10-16) that it has since left my vocabulary, Gunn Allen rolls a
hand-grenade into the tent of
"magical realism" (239ff) in describing the inability of critics to let a story do its job without
pre-shackling the
reader's ability to wonder. From "Thus Spake Pocahontas" we hear the multiculturalist academic,
tired of the
pretentious ambushes of faculty politics: "Even our few solid backers in academe perceive us as
extensions of the
great white way. . . . Our capacities as creative, self-directing, self-comprehending human beings
are lost in the
shuffle of ideology and taxonomy" (164).
At heart, though, Off the
Reservation observes a very large world from its Laguna neighborhood, very much
through woman-centered eyes: "Where I come from, God is a Woman; her name is Thinking
Woman. She is
accompanied by her sister-goddesses Memory and what I will translate{89} as Intuition, and she is an elder of the
male gender. She is called Grandmother . . . and also Spider . . . Where I come from, society is . .
. matrilineal,
matrilocal, and matrifocal" (89). While Paula Gunn Allen does not rival the seventeen or more
family photographs
that Owens offers in MixedbloodMessages, her Pueblo and Lebanese
ancestors show themselves as vividly through
her, the "mixed-blood Laguna girl" born "on the border of the mixed-blood Laguna Reservation
and the Cubero Land
Grant, to a mixed-blood Laguna mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and perhaps
great-great- grandfather to
Oak clan, to the Sunrise/Summer people; and to a Maronite-American father born and raised
around the mountain to
the east of Cubero" (4).

At the heart of both the fiction
and scholarly work of author Louis Owens is an exploration of mixed blood
identity. His latest book, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place,
continues that examination with a
collection of essays that probes a variety of genre- films, literature, family photos and stories, and
environmental
commentaries. This mix of genres is appropriate as they all center around an ability to exist in a
mixed blood space of
hyphenated identity. He argues that "virtually everything that is new and vital and exciting in
American literature
today is coming from the so-called margins" (xv). As a result readers will be required to "read
across lines of cultural
identity around us and within us" (11).
Speaking from a mixed heritage of
Cherokee, Choctaw and Irish, Owens discusses who has the right to speak as
a Native American for Native Americans. Is determining authenticity as simple as knowing the
tribal affiliation of the
author? He asks why the rules are different for authors who write about Native Americans than
they are for canonical
writers who write about love and war without the appropriate credentials. He asks who reads
these novels and
questions what they expect to find in "Indian Territory." Additionally, are American Indian
writers creating
opportunities for "literary tourism," or are they subversively using the colonizers' language to
disguise their anger?
Owens argues that Native American writers have moved away from subversion and have begun
"to openly confront
the dominant culture on its own textual grounds" (23). As the voices from the margins begin to
surround and possibly
engulf the center, {91} Native American writers are
insisting that the world enter into dialogue with the literature and
make it a part of their existence, rather than experience it as a "literary tourist."
In his essays on American Indian
novels, Owens continues critical analyses begun in Other Destinies:
Understanding the American IndianNovel. He offers new insights into the
works of American Indians ranging from
early writers such as John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to writers of the
Native American
Renaissance such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch and Gerald Vizenor. Owens
touches on current
literary theories espoused by scholars of Bahktin and Said and proposes that there needs to be a
new kind of
critical-theoretical approach if "multiculturalism is to be more than another discourse of
dominance, what has been
called 'critical imperialism'" (49). These essays are interesting, grounded in critical theory and
ideas, and provide new
perspectives on what Gerald Vizenor labels as the literature of "survivance." Also interesting and
often wryly amusing
are Owens' analyses of two Hollywood portrayals of American Indians: Kevin Costner's
DancesWith Wolves and
John Wayne westerns, specifically The Searchers. Owens admits to distrusting and
even disliking John Wayne as he
was growing up. He explains that when he found out "John Wayne's real name was Marion, that
cut it. I knew then
that he had made up everything, the whole kit and caboodle from beginning to end" (100). In the
course of 150 films,
Marion Morrison reinvented himself and grew into the hero that America demanded to "match
the nation's
pathological craving for an archetypal hero fitted to the great, violent myth of the American
West" (101). In his
discussion of The Searchers, Owens explores the ambiguity of Wayne's attitude
toward Indians; but he finally posits
that although in all his films Wayne cannot exist outside "Indian Country," the films' storylines
reflect America's
eroticized hatred of the indigenous peoples of America.
On the other hand, albeit
Dances With Wolves represented an important breakthrough in many ways in
Hollywood's representation of American Indians, Owens astutely sees the trickster tale
underneath the politically
correct surface. Owens asserts that Dances With Wolves depicts in "marvelously
complete fashion the crux of
America's relationship with the indigenous people of this continent" (127). Disguised as exactly
the opposite, the film
is a reenactment of the colonization of America, "a narrative whose purpose is simply to erase
Indians from the
national consciousness as actual, living people" (126).
In contrast to the humor Owen
exhibits in the discussion of films, the "Autobiographical Reflections" section, a
section which should be the{92}most
personal, is often melancholy and distant. The reader becomes a part of the
search for his identity as Owens verbally sifts through family photographs and stories, not always
able to put faces and
names together. As he moves through his own personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi,
California and New
Mexico, he begins to question both Indian identity and relationships with the landscape-ideas
embodied within his
own personal mixed blood history and represented in Indian literature and film.
In Mixedblood
Messages, Louis Owens has provided another valuable resource for Native American
Studies.
This group of nonfiction essays complements both his previous fiction works (Wolfsong,
The SharpestSight, Bone
Game, Nightland) as well as his nonfiction and critical work.

Diane Glancy's burden as an
American Indian writer is precisely her gift: to animate those voices long considered
unfit for literary or scholarly representation, to empower those voices too ordinary, too marginal,
or both. Like many
contemporary American Indians, Glancy is of mixed descent, identifying ancestors who were
Cherokee, English, and
German. And like many American Indians, Glancy was not raised in a predominantly Indian
community. Instead, as
her Cherokee father sought employment, her family relocated frequently within the dominant
culture, only
infrequently returning to the Cherokee world of her grandmother. Moving between worlds has
characterized Glancy's
adult life as well. Over the past decade, in an impressive list of book-length works in every genre,
she has worked to
excavate the intersections and ironies of her mixed heritage and to analyze her life of
travel.
In her most recent collection of
creative nonfiction, The Cold-and-HungerDance, Glancy once again
begins with
her personal journey, stating that she "was born between two cultures . . . I could walk in both
worlds; I could walk in
neither" (2). This is the "ordinary" experience that informs the collection: a contemporary
American Indian experience
of living with mixed blood and with mixed heritage. Of living in what Glancy calls "a no man's
land" (2), feeling
"outside of every tradition I've been in" (28). Of identifying as an American Indian, as a
mixedblood, as a poet, as an
academic, and as a Christian--despite the potential for conflict among any combination of these
subject positions.
Rather than allow her self-described position as "a marginal voice in several worlds" to disable
her, Glancy seizes the
power of the marginal to "tell several stories at once" (1). {94}And
as in her previous works of poetry, drama, fiction,
and nonfiction prose, Glancy confronts her "ordinary" experience of constant negotiation with a
survivor's sense of
humility and humor, with an understated passion, and with a striving toward theory and its
promise of greater clarity.
The sixteen pieces collected in
The Cold-and-Hunger Dance range widely in both form and topic. In addition to
expository essays, readers encounter poems, transcribed oral storytelling, and extended
metaphors and meditations.
Connecting these diverse individual performances of memoir, analysis, and contemplation is a
persistent attention to
the details of living and thinking between identities, between
cultures, between histories and spiritualities. There is
also a persistent attempt to manipulate standard and academic American English into forms that
might represent the
complexity and the volatility of the in-between. In the title essay, for instance, Glancy rehearses
the trajectory of her
writing life; she begins by contemplating her early and ongoing hunger for reading the Bible, a
text "which is full of
stories of expanding boundaries." She writes that "I think I am a Christian because of the words
in the Bible. The
sturdiness of them. The oratures of them" (3). As the essay progresses, Glancy's
sense of the "storyness" of the
Bible--its relationship to oral traditions--helps to connect her Christianity and her development as
a writer to "Native
American storying," which she defines as "an act of gathering many voices to tell a
story in many different ways."
Glancy argues that this "alignment of voices" is typical of Native "storying"; American Indian
stories construct a
"relationalstance" that is not typically a feature of dominant Western
discourses, "a migratory and interactive process
of the moveable parts within the story." As yet, Glancy notes, there is no adequate terminology
for the process of
rendering American Indian oral traditions with the written word, but she sees herself as working
toward giving "solid
nomenclature to something that is a moving process, and resists naming" (9).
Glancy develops this theme of writing
from a location somewhere between Christianity and American Indian
traditions in essays titled "Sun Dance," "The Bible and Black Elk Speaks," and "On
Boards and Broken Pieces of the
Ship." In "A Fieldbook of Textual Migrations," Glancy complicates her position as a
contemporary Native writer by
examining her relationship to the Cherokee language, which she does not speak. "To be Indian is
to know the loss of
language," she writes. But, unsatisfied with the seeming finality of that mournful statement, she
pushes toward
theorizing what it might mean to write from a position of such loss, what it might mean to
imagine the possibilities of
surviving, even surpassing the {95}disruption of language. "To be delanguaged,"
she writes, "is a recitrocity"--a
reciprocating atrocity--"It has ramifications" not only for the language lost to subordination or
oblivion, but also for
the language made dominant. Glancy tries to imagine an American English imbued "with the
otherness of the
[indigenous] languages it met. Without the interfuss [the quarrel between] of them.
Which is their absence" (102).
Unable to reclaim the Cherokee language as an integrated, fully functioning system of
communication and culture,
Glancy gleans what lessons she can from inscriptions of written Cherokee, "to write words I can't
speak," to write the
"life" suggested by Cherokee language through her own manipulations of English--"Because
directly is not a route" (105).
As the above examples make clear,
Glancy's experiments with language play, like those of Gerald Vizenor, are
attempts to produce adequate theories for understanding the particular conditions under which
contemporary
American Indians produce literature. Toward the middle of her essay entitled "She-ro-ism,"
Glancy states, "I like to
make up words to fit the broken disenfranchisement I feel" (97). However, as yet Glancy's efforts
at "doing theory"
lack an active dialogue with the work of other Native writers, critics, and scholars--in addition to
Vizenor, Paula
Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Jace Weaver come readily to mind--that
might push her
theorizing toward greater precision. What might become possible if Glancy juxtaposed her
"storying" with Vizenor's
"survivance"? If she responded directly to Warrior's call for "intellectual sovereignty"? Or if she
situated her "made up
words" within Cook-Lynn's reflections on "what it means to claim the power to narrate"? These
questions are meant
not as negative criticism of The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, which I find to be a work
of considerable beauty and
power, but rather as a hope for Glancy's future endeavors. In Claiming Breath, her
award-winning 1992 collection of
essays, Glancy defines her ongoing project simply and profoundly: "That's what writing is," she
tells us, "we come to
grips with the world in our own way." Indeed, this may be the central lesson of Glancy's
work--that the clarity and
precision of theory begins with the mapping of our own "ordinary" lives.

There's a possibility of
interpreting a book according to your own vision and not what the author intended.
Cook-Lynn is not a writer you do that to.

Imagine Indians
hunted like wild beasts along the
sun-drenched river beds
smoke on every horizon
the wounded lying in the bushes
unable to run or regret.

You've got the picture. ("Remembering the Spirit and the Land in the Time
of Sitting Bull")

In this new poetry collection,
Cook-Lynn is focused as usual. She takes responsibility head on.

I worry
that the pact we made in order to
save ourselves marks us survivors of the wasteful dead . . . ("To Whomever One Calls Whenever
One Has a
Quarter")

This is a writer I respect, a writer
whose essays, Why I Can't ReadWallace Stegner, I use every year in
class. I
am glad to have these poems.{97}
Oddly enough, as I read her poems, I
was flying over the Black Hills in South Dakota where she returned when
she retired from academic life. I thought of her there. Maybe it's why the poems seemed so real to
me. I also thought
of Black Elk who said the Black Hills were the center of the earth. Certainly it seemed so from
the air, especially as
the plane crossed from South Dakota across the flat brown floor of Montana.
There is no title poem in the
collection, but the title is in the first line of a poem, "Collaborator," which
introduces the thought of the loss of the past:

Forgive me, my children
I barely hear soft raindrops on shrouded drums
of my father and his father and yours.
Periodic, unpredictable, their songs
sway in the gloom
of my forfeiture.

Reading the poem, I got the feeling the fallen trees are the songs and voices, maybe the
relatives and ancestors themselves.
There were times I wished for the
explicit. "I don't like people who go behind the bush and beat around"
Cook-Lynn tells us in "The Bleak Truth Is." But I felt there was a beating around the bush. I
wanted to hear the stories
of the river in that poem. I wanted to hear more specifics. But maybe they are private tribal
matters that remain unsaid.
Sometimes I felt a cold reconciliation:
"things pass and times are gone forever" ("The Way It Is"). Sometimes I
felt resolution:

I silently promise
the woman who lived here
before me that in this
burnt-out twentieth century
the flame won't flicker and out. ("Spider as She Used to Be")

Always, I felt the unseen ones:

I encounter
the real and imagined
spirits and am annoyed
with them for
appearing in my headlights{98}
like anguished relatives
who know my wounds. ("Muffled Thunder")

I liked reading about Cook-Lynn's
life. Her achievements. I also felt Cook-Lynn's poignancy in her academic
position in a prose poem:

Eventually we drove our aging Pontiac to a college town which led us
through days designed by racist
professors and disciplines that deserved to be blown up, splintered and charred. In that place, still
warm from
regular paychecks and full tables we grew to know that those who suffer loneliness don't always
learn to despise
themselves if their bellies are full. ("My Previous Life")

But getting back to what I thought
about as I read her book, not beating around the bush any longer: it is my own
stance with faith and Christianity I saw as I read the book, which is readily dismissed by Native
Americans, and
sometimes readily hated. But I see that subject in I rememberthe fallen
trees. I see Christian images all through
Cook-Lynn's work. Maybe because I want to see them, Catholicism, in this case, though
denominations and their
differences are another subject:

Inyan (the rock) was said to be soft
and without shape
and all-powerful
until he opened himself and bled
and then he became hard
giving some of his power away. ("Not Everything")

This is the first piece in the book and I thought of Christ.

When the Dakotapi really lived as they wished, they thought it important to
possess a significant tattoo mark.
This enabled them to identify themselves for the grandmothers who stood on the ghost road
entering the spirit
world asking "mitakoja (grandchild), where is your tattoo?" If the Dakota could not show them
his mark, they
pushed that one down an abyss and he never reached the spirit land.

This piece opens section IV.
Again I saw Christianity, fundamental Christianity that explains the mark of blood
on the doorpost in Exodus 12:13 as a type of the blood of Christ that would mark the believer. I
also thought of the
unbelievers with the mark of the beast in Revelation 14:9. {99} Christianity itself was named in "My Grandmother's
Burial Ground":

Ancestral bones
lie in anonymity in this New World
except that History called you Christian
and your name
kill-in-war-with-spear
vouched for you.

Also from that same poem: "History, that 'counterfeit absurdity'/is no match for Buffalo
bones/and dried skins of crows."
In "Mythology of the Eternal
Homeland," Cook-Lynn writes: "We talk of apostates/and the price we paid." I
wondered here if they were apostates from their own tradition or apostates from the Christianity
that missionaries
tried to force on them.
Other lines, from "Distances":

I was nine, reading the parables while
standing
at the apron of the altar . . .
The words were not in my heart.
Stone valley bushes along
the creek where the diamond willows grow, sky color light
against a fishy star in dark waters. That's the real sermon. . . .
I come to wonder about disbelief this time of my solitary years.

After walking the dusty roads alone and counting the miles
all day I see the yellow of my grandmother's dress
go farther and farther away from the distant reaches of the
imagined world of parable and Christ's fables; my breath the
breathed vengeance of a hapless survivor.

Anti-Christian, certainly, but Christian concerns nonetheless.
It made me regret the Church didn't do
a more inclusive job, but instead, alienated so many Native Americans.
"We lighted candles in a church that didn't want us," again from "My Previous Life." Maybe,
given a chance, the
Native could have enriched Christianity, made it the useful faith it should have been, especially
since the Native
already acted on a community of voices and the sharing of possessions. If poetry draws you out
of your own world,
then returns you to it, changed, I had that sense of something that could have been.{100}
The Christian imagery and dialogue
and experience continue, as I said, throughout the book. "In this image, she
seems to sit on the floor of the small Christian chapel, surrounded by many relatives and friends
of the community,
her long white hair bound with a black silk scarf. . . . Finally, with the last of her courage, she lets
the Catholic priest
take the body of her beloved and beautiful daughter and place it in a box and bury it deep inside
the darkened earth."
From the prose poem, "Old Woman Loved to Sing."

Later
we cross the bridge
but not before we scrutinize
the cost compose the history
of the world according to
all the pleas of all the Indian priests
we ever knew

Immense distances
hold authority
as we learn
in good conscience
the bitter stories
of broken faith. ("Getting Rich")

A bitter faith? Is it possible? Is it
what Cook-Lynn is exploring? A relinquishing, a coming to terms with an
occasional kick.
If another purpose of poetry is to get
us in trouble (at least reviewing a poet's work can serve that purpose), to
keep the dust stirred up in the cleared path of fallen trees, this terrific collection provides the
reader with poetry they
can enter at their own risk.

Leslie Marmon Silko's much
loved first novel Ceremony (1977) is probably the most widely read and taught
novel by a Native American writer. Her next novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991),
published fourteen years later,
surprised and shocked her readers with its apocalyptic ferocity. Gardens in the Dunes
(1999), her third novel, is just
as much a surprise, although of a very different kind, and demonstrates once again that Silko is
one of the most
talented and versatile of American writers. A meticulously researched historical novel set at the
turn of the Twentieth
Century, Gardens in the Dunes returns to a kind of literary realism in the tradition
of Henry James, exploring in lively
detail the pursuits of wealthy East Coast aristocrats during the period of the closing of the
Western frontier. Gardensin the Dunes also draws on elements of the naturalist tradition, American
Transcendentalism, and Gothic
Romance--invoking writers as diverse as James, Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, the Brontes,
Wilkie Collins, and
Margaret Fuller--to build an exciting tale of adventure, intrigue and mystery. By returning to
more familiar genre and
narrative conventions and overtly drawing on canonical American and British literary figures,
Silko brings her work
into the literary mainstream in a way that cannot be ignored. At the same time, Gardens in
the Dunes challenges and
reshapes those conventions into something that is distinctly indigenous. Thus Silko accomplishes
the kind of
reindigenization of the continent that she predicts in Almanac of the Dead, a
"retaking of the Americas," as Silko
explains in a recent interview, that is "not literal, but . . . in a spiritual way of doing things,
getting along with each
other, with the earth and the animals" (Arnold 10).{102}
The central character of
Gardens in the Dunes is Indigo, an eleven-year- old girl of the disappearing Sand
Lizard
tribe, a fictional group of Colorado River Indians who lived peaceful, agrarian lives before the
invasion of
Euroamericans. Indigo is separated from her mother when soldiers break up a performance of the
Ghost Dance. After
the death of their Grandma Fleet, Indigo and her Sister Salt are captured, and Indigo is sent to
boarding school in
Riverside, California. She escapes and takes refuge with Hattie Abbott Palmer, a scholar whose
disappointment over
the rejection of her controversial graduate thesis on "the feminine principle" (101) in early
Christian history impelled
her into a marriage of convenience to botanist Edward Palmer. Heirs to wealthy Long Island
families, the Palmers
have come to California to manage the family citrus groves, while Edward struggles desperately
to recoup investment
losses and rebuild the waning family fortune. Thinking Indigo is an orphan, the Palmers take her
on a summer tour of
the grand homes and elaborate gardens of East Coast and European family and friends, and
Hattie and Indigo enter
into a process of mutual education. Hattie teaches Indigo the pleasures of books, art, and travel,
while Indigo's intense
delight in the beauties of the world, her devotion to her animal companions--the monkey
Linnaeus and the parrot
Rainbow--and her unflagging determination to return to her family and their gardens in the dunes
teach Hattie a new
way of being in the world. Hattie's growing bond with Indigo and her commitment to returning
the Sand Lizard child
to her home help Hattie recover the courage of her convictions and reclaim her rights as a woman
to self-definition
and joy. By the end of the novel, betrayed by Edward and stripped of her dowry and possessions,
Hattie turns to her
Indian women friends for help when she realizes she cannot return to "her former life among the
lies" (461).
Silko's suspenseful tale of separation
and reunion, treachery and revenge is told in rich, lyrical prose, with
generous humor and exquisitely detailed description, providing delicious feasts of flavors and
scents, color and light,
texture and sound. A major trope of the novel is consumption, and through it Silko contrasts two
very different ways
of relating to and taking in the world. Grandma Fleet and Indigo, like Edward Palmer and his
colonial cronies, collect
and import seeds and plant cuttings, cultivate and hybridize them to augment their beauty and
improve yields. But the
Sand Lizard people care for plants like relatives, in intimate and mutually sustaining
relationships that nourish spirit
as well as bodies and weave humans into the living web of interdependence and creativity that is
the hallmark theme
of Silko's work. One of the novel's characters observes of the booming Southwest, "[S]omething
was wrong here. Too
much taken away and not enough given back" (421). What the Sand Lizard people {103} give back is respect and
love, expressed in the pleasures of sensory attunement and ingestion, in the giving of the self to
nourish what sustains
human life, as Grandma Fleet gives her body in death to feed the apricot trees she has lovingly
grown from pits
salvaged in city dumps. In contrast, the extravagant formal gardens of the New England Robber
Baron estates,
transplanted and forced to bloom at obscene cost, exemplify the flowering of capitalism in the
Americas, the
reshaping of the land for power, profit, and display that builds on the exploitation and destruction
of its native human,
animal, and plant inhabitants, and the creation of economic dependencies that prevent
subsistence outside the system.
British and American capitalism consumes the world without giving back, epitomized by the
damming of the
Colorado River, the burning of large areas of Brazilian jungle to insure that Victorian investors
possess the only
specimens of rare orchid species or disease-resistant rubber plants, and Edward's theft of citron
cuttings in an attempt
to break Corsican monopoly of the citron trade.
Yet Gardens in the Dunes
refuses to break down into oppositions between tribal and Euroamerican, traditions
and technologies; rather Silko examines systems of thought that underlie Western patriarchal
culture's oppression of
women, indigenous peoples, animals, and earth, and explores ways that the exploited and
powerless can join together
across artificial national and cultural boundaries against the forces of destruction fueled by the
drive to possess and
catalogue, control and produce. Silko has said that the creation of Gardens in the Dunes
was part of her own healing
from the writing of Almanac of the Dead and a reward for her readers, who waited
so long for Almanac and accepted
its strong medicine (Arnold 7). Almanac describes the return of the days of the
Death's Eye Dog foretold by the
ancient Mayan calendars, a period of male dominance characterized by the worship of violence
and aversion to all
that is associated with the female--fertility, nurturing, emotional and spiritual connection, life
itself. Gardens in the
Dunes focuses on women, women coming together to form alliances among themselves
and with the other living
creatures and plants of the earth that will remake the world by restoring life-giving practices of
caretaking and
inclusivity. Silko deftly links the Gnostic heresies Hattie researches, which celebrate the power
of women, with the
fertility goddesses and myths of old Europe so lovingly displayed in the Italian professoressa
Laura's gardens, and ties
them through Indigo's experience to the oral traditions, matrilineal systems, and joyful sexuality
of American Indian women.
Though without the structural and
temporal challenges of her earlier novels, Gardens in the Dunes, as Silko
herself observes, is possibly more {104}subversive even than Almanac, especially in the
way it breaks down barriers
between Euroamerican and Native cultures (Arnold 11; Cohen). Linking the old stories and
spirits of Europe and the
Americas, absorbing and restructuring the stories of Christianity by bringing an uncrucified
Christ across the ocean
with his Mother, wife and children to hearten American Ghost Dancers, Silko patiently draws the
patterns and
impulses that connect people across cultures: the longings for the fullness of sensory
participation with/in the material
world, for respect and love that speak across languages (as the words of the Messiah are
understood by all present at
the Ghost Dance), for the unmediated experience of spiritual luminacy, joy, and deep connection
that occurs in
moments of transcendence. Gardens in the Dunes is also subversive in the way that
it restructures the reader's
perceptions. Through Indigo's experiences, the reader's awareness is immersed in a flood of rich
and sumptuous
sensory input. We are taught the kind of close attention to and participatory re-merging with the
world that is
characteristic of indigenous communities and must be recovered in order to remake the broken
relationship between
humans and the world. In this healing novel, Silko reimagines the survival of all peoples on earth
as a sensuous and
ecstatic possibility.

Chadwick Allen
is the current Vice President of ASAIL and an Assistant Professor of English at
Ohio State
University, where he teaches postcolonial and American Indian literatures.

Ellen L. Arnold
is a doctoral candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University and has just
been hired
as Assistant Professor in the English Department at East Carolina University, where she will
teach American and
Native American literatures and cultures.

Stuart Christie
is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with
Louis Owens.
Stuart Christie currently teaches in the Department of English of Hong Kong Baptist
University.

Barbara J. Cook
is enrolled in the English Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon, where she is a
Graduate
Teaching Fellow. She received an MA in American Studies from Utah State University, where
she was an Instructor
of Writing. She received her BA in Art, with an emphasis in Art History and a Minor in
Southwestern Studies, from
Southwest Texas University.

Diane Glancy
teaches Scriptwriting and Native American Literature at Macalester College. Her
forthcoming
books are The Voice That Was inTravel (short stories) from the
University of Oklahoma Press, Fuller Man (novel)
from Moyer Bell, and Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the {106} Detours (anthology) from Coffee House
Press. Her plays also are forthcoming in various anthologies.

Stuart
Hoahwah, member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, received his BA in
English at the University
of Arkansas at Little Rock. He plans to pursue a graduate degree at Oklahoma State University
next year.

Elaine A. Jahner
is a professor of English and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. She
has
published, translated, and analyzed texts from various Dakota and Lakota communities. Many of
these texts were
recorded at the turn of the century. She has also specialized in and published numerous articles
on cross-cultural
literary criticism.

Helen Jaskoski
is the author of Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of theShort
Fiction (Twayne1998) and Early
Native American Writing (Cambridge 1999). She has published widely in American
literature.

Cynthia McDaniel
currently teaches composition and literature while working on an MA degree in
English and
ESL certification at San Diego State University. Her research interests include Native American
literatures,
autobiography, and linguistics.

David Payne
teaches technical writing, early American literature, and American Indian literatures
at the
University of Georgia, where he also directs the writing center. Those things about which he has
found himself
sufficiently ignorant to justify research include The Cherokee Phoenix, Herman
Melville, and Flannery O'Connor.

Darrell Jesse Peters
is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico and will begin teaching at the
University of North Carolina at Pembroke in August 1999. He fishes.